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I picked up the habit of bird-watching early in the pandemic, socially distancing on a patio, watching the bird feeders my friend had installed at his home. I added my own and quickly became one of those people who would stare out the window and invest too much money in sunflower seeds. But then I started seeing Instagram posts from my friend’s smart bird feeder and realized this was the perfect marriage of technology and nature. There are tons of smart bird feeders on the market now, and I’ve tested a bunch of them. If you’re looking to buy one for yourself (or as a gift), here are some considerations to make.
How to choose what kind of bird feeder to get
Non-smart bird feeders come in all different forms to support different bird food and birds species—some are meant for seed, some for suet, and some for sugar water. Smart bird feeders only exist in two forms (so far): seeds and sugar water for song birds and hummingbirds, respectively.
Hummingbirds are incredibly delicate and need their water changed out every few days in winter and every single day in summer. Also, you have to make the sugar water. It’s not hard, but it is an added chore (and you should not buy the red hummingbird premade food, according to experts). Bird seed, in contrast, needs only be changed and cleaned every week or so, (unless you see sick birds at your feeder, in which case you should remove the feeders immediately for a period of time and sterilize everything).
Songbirds are year round, but hummingbirds have a season. Many hummingbirds migrate in winter, so you might experience less sightings than you would with songbirds. Obviously, there are more varieties of songbirds, so you may get to see a lot more kinds of birds with a songbird feeder. Still, there is simply nothing as delightful as video of hummingbirds at your feeder, so all arguments aside, I still recommend it.
Are Bird Buddy’s worth it?
I have two Bird Buddy feeders: the original songbird feeder and the new hummingbird feeder. I’ve had the original for a year or so, and I won’t say it’s been seamless. First and foremost, despite having a solar panel on the bird house, the camera is constantly running out of battery. This is annoying since it means the camera goes offline and you have to take the feeder down, and turn it back on once it has enough charge again. I have a lot of smart cameras around the yard, and none of them have this issue with solar panels powering them. The hummingbird feeder, despite a much smaller solar panel, does not seem to have the same issues as the original feeder, but I eventually purchased an additional third party solar panel for my original Bird Buddy.
I have also found Bird Buddy support to be responsive, but not terribly customer forward. In cases where the solution was obvious (the camera is dead), it took a number of exchanges of information and video for customer support to agree to a replacement.
As a last hit, it is often hard to pair the Bird Buddy cameras to your wifi, as was the case of each of my Bird Buddy houses.
Bird Buddy is still the best smart bird feeder
So it might seem odd to still suggest the Bird Buddy, but it has one feature far above any competitor: the app. The Bird Buddy app is downright addictive. You’re notified you have a visitor to your bird feeder with an adorable chirp, and if you click through fast enough, you’ll get a live view of the camera with crisp, clear color. Even if you miss it, your camera collects “postcards” in photo and video form that are easy to download for sharing on social platforms. Then, at the end of the day, you get a roundup of all activity at the feeder that is pretty delightful.
Even better, the app will take a crack at identifying the birds for you, though not always accurately. This is a big deal because once you start bird watching, you immediately start to want to know more about the birds themselves so you can sound appropriately haughty to others when you brag about the nuthatches and sparrows visiting your yard.
Finally, while Bird Buddy offers subscriptions, you don’t need one to enjoy the feeder. While the subscription lets you check in on other, more interesting feeders around the world and lets you name your favorite returning birds, plus adds some cloud storage, you can get all the important functionality of the feeder without the subscription.
The reality is that if you can get past the connection and charging issues, once the BirdBuddy is in place it is, without a doubt, the best experience for actually watching birds. Every day, my Bird Buddy hummingbird feeder sends me video of the same two hummingbirds, and every single day, I am riveted.
Despite promise, other bird feeders don’t come through
Given my frustration with my Bird Buddy’s, I was eager to find other brands that would serve me better. To that end I tried both the Vicohome Hummingbird feeder, and the Hello Birdy Smart Birdbath and feeder. In favor for both of these feeders? They connected instantly with no issues whatsoever. In the case of the Vicohome, you barely need to do more than remove it from the box and it is ready to go. In fact, before it even made it outside, it was serving consistent notifications of activity nearby, which should have been a red flag.
Once outside, the Vicohome notified me so often of activity that I quickly turned off the notifications. Not once was the alert for a bird, but more often a nearby car or person walking along. I tried changing the direction of the birdhouse, but the slightest wind resulted in a notification of activity. It takes birds a while to find a new birdhouse, so eventually those notifications would have led to a bird sighting, but I’ll never know because those notifications also drain the battery. After recharging twice just to lose all charge after a day or two, I gave up on the Vicohome.
The Hello Birdy birdbath is a great concept— a plastic birdbath with a space for hummingbird food and fresh fruit, which birds like orioles enjoy. I know that birds already love my yard for bird baths; I have a few, and a number of hummingbirds are territorial of my yard.
While the Hello Birdy camera was easy to connect, it required the most assembly. It is the only camera that comes with its own stand, but that stand is only three feet off the ground, which I find far too susceptible for squirrels, and not very interesting for hummingbirds. If it were merely a bird bath, that height would be fine, but I decided to give it a try with all the optional food sources and see what happened.
The upside was I wasn’t assaulted with notifications. To the contrary, there were zero notifications. Despite seeing birds in the bath a few times and the orange I placed in the feeder being gone, there were no recordings or clips of activity at the feeder.
There are other brands of feeders, including Birdfy, which I’m excited to try. But for now, the two Bird Buddy feeders remain in my yard, while the other feeders have been sunset. The Bird Buddy, despite all its fussiness, is still the closest you’ll get to bird-watching nirvana.
