Bird Buddy: Tap Into Nature

ADDENDUM: A new version was just released that fixes my issues below. Much improved, now 5 stars! Overall it is a lot of fun to be able to see birds up close. It takes great pictures and the solar panel works great. Before I had the solar panel the battery life was limited and I had to recharge every few days. A few kind of annoying things: 1) The biggest one is that there is no way to “mute” or silence birds. As a result you get tons of alerts/postcards of the same species (in my case house finches). Each requires multiple taps. It would be really nice if you could group or mute birds so it takes pictures, but you can see them only if you want to (ie. “House finches came to your feeder 15 times today, click here to see the pictures”). Then you can still see the pics, but you don’t have to spend a lot of time clicking through the same species 15 times per day. 2) The identification algorithm is good but not great. Biggest issue I have with it is that it will identify birds as a species that are not found anywhere around where I live (for example, it will identify birds here in the Pacific NE as a bird found only in Florida). Granted weird things happen but geographic location should be a pretty big factor in the ID. Overall is fun, and worth the purchase, but the details are still being worked on.

I keep reading bad reviews and a lot of negative remarks on social media about the wait time for this product. We all bought it with the knowledge it was being developed and the wait would be long. It was well worth my 15 month wait. Both the product and the app are brand new so everyone should expect some kinks. The company has been great about sending out email updates and keeping people informed. The app does randomly log me out sometimes, but logging in with your Google account or Apple ID means you don’t have to type your email and password every time. Worth it. The photo quality has everything to do with the direction your camera faces and mostly with how close the birds are. Some birds have a habit of standing in the food when they eat and they’re always out of focus 😂 Not Bird Buddy’s fault, just the bird itself. I really appreciate the ability to classify a bird as a “Mystery” to give me time to research and identify better. And I like being able to edit the type of bird in case it’s wrong. Overall I’m very pleased with the progress of the app and I LOVE my bird buddy. Highly recommend the solar roof add-on. I haven’t charged my battery in 10 days bc of solar charging 🙌

I backed the Bird Buddy on Kickstarter, and the company did a great job keeping me informed of the process while it was in development. I got my Bird Buddy last week, and found it fairly easy to put together and get up and running. At first I was disappointed that it did not take many photos - I would see a bird taking seed, but no "postcard" would be generated. However, they published an app update this morning, and now I am getting a lot of photos. The photos are also very good: clear, sharp, detailed. My one request at this point is as follows. Once in a while, the AI cannot recognize the bird. It then gives choices of possible species for the user to click to identify the bird. It would be better, however, if the user could type in the name of the bird, because each time this has happened, the choices given were all incorrect! If I could type in the bird name, I could correctly identify and categorize those photos. Overall though, great job Bird Buddy! I get so excited with each new photo!! UPDATE: the developers responded to this review with an email instructing me how to correctly identify unrecognized birds. Thank you, Bird Buddy!

Unless you are new to Bird Buddy and saving everything no matter what, the most commonly used button for more seasoned Bird Buddy users (that are more selective with what is actually worth saving) is the discard button. This latest update buries that button in a Multi-Option menu. What used to be a simple single click is now multi-click. What I don’t understand is why “share” stays on as a single click when I don’t think I’ve ever used it but once or twice in the past 1.5 years to share a clip with my a family member. If you have to bury something, bury share and give us back a single click discard please. Even if you don’t bury the share button, there’s still plenty of screen real estate to put a single click discard back where it is supposed to be. Heck, even just putting a red trash can icon on the screen will do the trick. I really don’t understand what the devs were thinking by burying the most used button, but I’m hopeful they’ll correct this mistake. Under Frenzy mode in my Pro account, I probably discard 25 to 30 sessions a day and save something from maybe 1 to 3 sessions a day. Easy to use discard is a must. If not for this mistake, this is easily a 5 star app.

Edit: it’s clear that the developer is now resorting to buying fraudulent reviews on the App Store. This app saw an influx of high ratings over the holidays, and many of those user names have “bb” in them - clearly fake accounts created to juice their otherwise terrible rating. Buyer beware, this company is a hot mess, and continues to offer zero support for customers, and a very buggy product. The reviews which mention wifi connection problems are spot-on. The developer has chosen to do some odd custom interface for connecting the device to wifi, rather than use iOS’s built-in tools for this, presumably because they thought it would be more cross-platform. But it absolutely does not work. I’ve worked in tech for 20 years and am very familiar with getting finicky IOT devices onto wifi, I pulled out all the stops, and still can’t connect because of the custom interface they insist on putting on top of the process. My home network is the latest from Eero, a very popular consumer router, and even using Eero’s tools for badly behaved devices, nothing works. And contacting support does nothing, they’re clearly drowning in support tickets from the preorders finally shipping. Great idea, absolutely abysmal execution. As soon as I can get a response from support, I’ll be returning this failure of a device. They’re going to have a very rough holiday of returns and angry gift givers.

BirdBuddy gives an exceptional close-up view of birds. The physical device -- bird feeder with camera -- is truly Great. The app is necessary to see pictures and video, but creates an endless stream of data which must be "accepted" -- *one image at a time* -- by a live person, making it a time-sucking nuisance. Bird identification automation is better than expected. Would really help if it could better apply its smarts to catalog all data, maybe discarding images it is sure are junk (as it already does for the most part), but otherwise letting users see everything all at once, and be able to delete unwanted acquisitions. Postcards metaphor is cute and a nice idea, but the human cost of being forced to process everything is infuriating. Doesn't actually send postcards... it sends invitations to go curate the latest acquisitions... which makes them much less welcome... but the video and images are wonderful. BirdBuddy, PLEASE take the human out of the loop -- save everything and let us delete bad shots (there are very few, your software does well with that). Send actual images (postcards), not dreaded demands to go make pictures viewable.

In my experience, the initial instructions were somewhat confusing. It seemed that the version of my BB software / firmware was not in sync with the online app info. Once I got it updated, installed and sending postcards, it was time to charge the battery and when I did so and put the camera module back in the BB, there was a problem. I reported the problem through the bot option. It said I needed human help. Sounded good. That was 2 days ago. I received an email confirming they received my request for help yesterday. In the meantime, the email included “Please kindly allow up to 7 business days ……”. And now BB app says camera module is “Out of the feeder” when it is not, and it is magnet to magnet so not upside down. I have searched through troubleshooting articles for what to do when the app says Out of the feeder, but to no avail. So I wait. And wish there were better instructions or tutorials. (I am a retired technical procedures writer and know the importance of writing for the audience of the app/process)

I am loving Bird Buddy as a whole, but the identification aspect seems to be off more often than it should be. I feel like there could be some improvements to the app itself. For instance, if I delete a mystery visitor that was part of a visit from a known visitor, it deletes some of the photos or video from all visitors listed, as if it has assigned certain photos to the species it has identified it as, even if it’s wrong. The video should be assigned to all species listed in that visit and stay in each collection, even if you delete it from another. I lost a super cute video because it was labeled as a purple finch, along with a song sparrow. The only bird there was a song sparrow. When I deleted the purple finch album from my collection, it deleted the video completely instead of leaving it in song sparrow. Very disappointing. My biggest suggestion at this point is that we should be able to “favorite” a photo or video and have it save in our collection in a “favorites” album, in addition to the species album it should already be in. That would make favorites easier to find. Seems like a simple update.

I just received my new bird buddy and was super excited after waiting nearly 2 years for it to arrive. I was incredibly disappointed to find that I can’t even get past the connect to WiFi step. I am an IT consultant, so I’m very familiar with setting up a 2.4ghz WiFi network with WPA2. I have a network setup like this specifically for older devices that won’t work with 5ghz. Regardless, the bird buddy refuses to stay connected to it. I can actually see the traffic on my network, and it briefly connects then disconnects over and over again until the app finally says it failed and that I should attempt a factory reset. I have done this over and over, including attempting to setup a new SSID with wpa1, another with wpa1/wpa2, and different names and passwords but regardless of what I try it won’t connect. I reached out to support and waited 5 days as requested with no response. I reached out again and it’s been multiple days again. I’m so frustrated with them and wish I could get my money back (or quite frankly, just a working bird buddy). If you haven’t purchased one yet, don’t waste your time. Update: the developer had time to respond to my message here to tell me they would reach out but it’s been weeks still with no response from their official support team. Ridiculous.

I hated this thing the first day. It didn’t seem like it was working. But then I read some people say that it takes a little bit. So I waited two days. Now I am in love with it! It’s so much fun getting postcards during the day. It does take a little time for the system to calibrate when you first set it up. I think it likes to build up a queue of postcards to space them out. I was expecting it to work instantly and it does not. But I love the way that it does it because I will randomly get postcards during the day. It sort of spreads out the fun. If you have an expectation that this thing is going to be like a ring doorbell, it is not. It isn’t designed to give you instant notifications when a bird shows up. It’s made to do its job in the background and you to get cool stuff randomly throughout the day. If you calibrate that at your expectation, you will love this thing!

Update: So, an update made it so I at least get the postcards (photos). Still no live feed. App is working, but biggest complaint is the “postcards” for new birds. If you have a birdfeeder, you will get dozens per day of instances. About half the time (no fault of the app) it can’t identify the bird because they’re blurred moving quickly or mostly turned away. But that means you have to open their “present”, then some animations, then sort through each picture with a bunch of “no”s. It takes a long time. Could work much faster if they could thumbnail the 4-8 pictures on each visit to just ditch the batch quicker. The unit works fine, although does burn through battery rather quickly. I’m not complaining about the wait time. I was fine with that. The app is really bad. I bought it for my wife and I can’t check the live feed and it was a real difficult set up. Very hard to initially set up and the app is just not good. UPDATE UPDATE: Yeah, I got like 31 dumb little treasure chests with animations and several pictures in each one, this would take at least an hour to go through. Tighten it up.

I was a fan and supporter of the BirdBuddy despite all the early bugs (bad IDs, lack of sensitivity to visitors, poor battery performance, syncing problems). There are always issues when a new product goes to market, I get it. But now Buddy has released the solution! Well, for a fee. To increase the sensitivity of the camera (that I already paid about $300 for) so it actually photographs birds, at the expense of its own battery life, I need to pay to unlock “pro?” What the heck? I watched from my window today as two finches, a scrub Jay, and a hummingbird came to my feeder. Bird Buddy recorded none of them. Can’t increase the sensitivity of the camera without paying for “frenzy mode” I guess. And since I share/receive access to feeders with some friends and family (my favorite feature of these feeders) upgrading my account wouldn’t increase the sensitivity of their feeders if they don’t have a pro account, so I’m still missing out. I was planning to buy a couple more of these, and I’ve been talking them up to friends and family, but I probably won’t get any more and won’t talk these up anymore if users need to pay just to get them to photograph birds properly. What a scam.

I have a very active feeder with a generally the same population of birds/species visiting regularly. The app treats each of those as a “present” for me to open/reveal. After a busy week of not tending to the app I now have hundreds of these presents to open. I want this app to treat all known birds like a photo feed - just show me the photos. Give me easy tools to remove photos i don’t like or want to keep. Same for the videos. When there are birds that can’t be identified due to backlighting or shadows, have those show up in a filtered view so i can identify them or delete them. When there is a new bird that i haven’t seen before or don’t see often maybe then use the “gift” animation for revealing them. I absolutely respect the work this team has done on the hardware/firmware side - my kickstarter edition feeder went from needing to be charged daily to now not having been charged in weeks due to optimizations in the firmware that have really made the solar a must-have feature. At present though (pun not intended) the app design is tiresome and saps the joy from using my feeder.

I have had my Bird Buddy in action for about 10 days now, and it has identified 8 bird species so far. I just love the whole idea of this combination feeder/camera/identifier, and I am very happy they were able to complete the project even with all the problems that COVID caused during their production. There are still some problems to be worked out, but I am confident they will get them fixed as time passes. For example: I have marauding blue jays who like to pose for the camera. I have saved 60 postcards thus far, and probably deleted almost that many. Still, every day, it asks me to ID blue jays in some very obvious pics. I had to look up in my Sibley book the difference between a house finch and a purple finch. I didn’t realize until now, that all of the purple finches in the postcards I saved are actually House finches. Now if I want to change the IDs I have to go through each pic individually and say “wrong bird”. And then I don’t think I could delete the whole empty folder. When it asks you to guess the species of the bird, it would be useful to magnify the photo. I don’t see where you can do that until you download it to a desktop computer. The postcards/pics are very high resolution when you do download them, but you can’t magnify them in the app. There are other minor issues I think they could work on, but overall I am very happy.

The picture quality is great. The setup process is painful and often needs to be repeated and repeated to get it to work. Once you actually get it to work it seems so far much easier. However, it is cumbersome to use their app. No easy delete for pictures you don’t want. You cannot organize your pictures at all so you end up with a big mess of jumbled groups of pictures. There is no way to select a lot of pictures to delete so you must go through them one at a time to delete. If mistakenly pick the wrong species and you want to change a picture to another you cannot. The reveal animation for your new pictures is quite annoying after the zillionth time you see and hear it and there is no watt to skip it so it takes longer to reveal pictures. If you don’t keep up with them you will dread clearing them out as it will take forever. If they could get someone to make the app better then it would be more enjoyable. As it is, it is a chore.

If I had listened to the reviews I would have missed out on this great product that brings great joy to my whole family. We received bird buddy within a month. It took five minutes to set up a little longer to charge up the first time. The charge lasts about 2-3 days. We were already feeding birds in our yard so we had an established community. If you are not seeing birds early on you may want to set up a feeder nearby to attract the birds to the bird buddy. We have seen an arsenal of birds up close and personal. The feeder cup makes adding seed to the Seed feeder meat and easy. Removing and charging the camera also very easy. The app is easy to use with entertaining graphics. This is a great product. If you love to feed birds in your yard you will love it. The app can be shared with three people who can see your post cards but not the live feed.

My mother loves birds, and loves all the features of this app. Few suggestions: 1) setting to ignore alerts form squirrels. She gets so excited when there is a new notification, but is let down when it’s just some clever squirrel. 2) an alert when the camera has been disconnected or dislodged from the housing. A low battery alert would be nice if it doesn’t already exist 3) I like how you can “collect” birds, but it would be great if the app told you how many different types are in your area so you know, for example, you’ve collected 27 out of 35 birds in your area, and would allow you to see which birds in your area you still need to collect (maybe even indicate how we could attract them). 4) I wish there was a live feed feature, that would allow you to quickly connect, but I understand that would probably impact battery life 5) ability to rank bird pictures in the community. With awards, for example, best bird of the day.

The concept is very cool, of course. But the app needs a ton of further development. I think it was a little rushed to market. It’s not as intuitive as it should be, requires too many clicks for basic functions, needs a more robust video playback (for example: frame-by-frame scrolling, snap a photo within a video — and i should be able to create a new visitor from this, as multiple birds are sometimes shown in one video.) There doesn’t seem to be a way to delete a new bird category when one has been created by accident. If I have miss identified a bird, and then figure it out, I can’t move that photo into its correct bird gallery; an error message says first I have to change the gallery cover photo. But there seems to be no way to do this either. I have a lot more suggestions, but hopefully the developers are already working on all of this and more. Once the novelty wears off, these multiple minor frustrations will add up quickly and sharply reduce usage.

I hate to write a bad review of a product I really do enjoy but it’s become almost unusable and I think they know it. Every few minutes I get an alert that I have a new bird. Exciting! But 90% of the time it’s a squirrel. My postcard feed is mostly squirrels. Not BB’s fault of course. They even have a feature where you can ignore certain species and not get notified about them. Perfect! But wait…that feature is only available for a monthly subscription fee. Now I get it. Even if you buy their hardware (feeder/camera), you need to pay them MONTHLY to avoid being spammed by alerts for something their vaunted AI could easily just prevent showing you. It’s like they’re deliberately spamming me now to get me to subscribe. They clearly know the data around the number of squirrels they’re alerting users about and they saw a chance to make a buck. Really too bad they don’t consider this a basic feature since without it their product is annoying rather than fun.

Got our bird buddy up and running a few weeks ago and overall love it so far. A few minor changes and improvements would make it amazing. First, it should automatically power down the camera at night to save battery. Even with the solar roof, when it is busy with birds the battery life is not good enough. Second, the recognition of squirrels needs fixed. They always show up as a mystery visitor, they are obviously squirrels, fix the AI…Third, way too many clicks to ignore a visitor. With the before mentioned squirrel, make it auto to ignore them. Finally, building on the too many clicks, for birds I already have in my collection, I don’t want to get countless postcards of the same birds over and over. Add a toggle where you could pick only getting postcards from new or unknown visitors. All in all, great app and product, just needs streamlined a bit to be way better😀.

I received this as a gift from my son and I must say that everything about the bird buddy is so well executed from the design of the packaging and app design to the impressive camera which by the way has not only video but audio. I have the solar panel which is also of very high quality. I honestly cannot think of a negative thing to say and I have had it for well over a month. For those who are on the fence regarding the price point, I would like to add that the price reflects the quality of the item. The bird buddy has turned my passive observation of the birds in my yard into a passion through its app that not only identifies the bird but also provides you with additional information. The app also has communities all over the world. Very impressive!

We just got our Bird Buddy for Christmas, and I’m very happy with it! The quality is solid and it works as advertised. Haven’t had a single problem. My biggest complaint is with the app. And hopefully this is just because it’s version 1.0 and will be improved with future releases. But the “postcard” workflow is just too much. I was busy yesterday and didn’t have time to address my bird Buddy notifications. This morning I have 26 unread postcards. It will take me at least half an hour to go through all those, because you have to open each one, wait for the animation, verify each “visitor”, then save/delete each photo. There’s no way to skip them. And if I don’t get “caught up” it will rapidly become a backlog that I will never get through. At first it was exciting to see each one. But now getting 12 postcards about House Sparrow per day, and 8 blurry photos of squirrel ears is starting to feel like a chore…

I enjoy the bird feeder so far, but I don’t have a good user experience within this app. It takes too long to open a postcard. It was exciting on the first day watching the animation while opening a postcard, but it gets old quickly. After we have the bird feeder set up, for 99.9% of the time it’s the same birds showing up. But we have to watch that animation every single time time when a bird visits. There should be an option to skip that animation. What’s worse, I have to label the bird in every single photo, even though we already know what the bird is in the first photo. There should be an option that allows user to identify birds in multiple photos at the same time, instead of one photo at a time. It has become so time consuming to open photos that I don’t feel like checking new postcards any more. Why can’t we just simply have a library of photos without any redundant animations??

Edit: postcards are finally coming through with the last camera update. The camera had to be reset and the app had to be redownloaded as it got stuck, which wasn’t great. App logs me out occasionally. Another issue is that an incorrect bird is sometimes used when identifying. For example, there was a choice between a house finch and pine siskin, but both example images were of the house finch. This will make it difficult for people to identify the birds if they don’t know them well. Looking forward to more improvements! So far, AI is not great. Birds are not being detected nor are postcards showing up when birds are on the feeder because it does not seem fast enough at capturing images. The only times we’ve gotten postcards are for squirrels and it seems like it is because they are on the feeder longer. It’d be nice if postcards could be generated from live view. Hoping it will improve with future updates

The photos are fantastic, but the app’s user interface is very clunky and the makers seem uninterested in hearing feedback that would improve it. The design of the feeder neglects to reflect understanding of bird anatomy (no perches to hold onto) and the storage space is poorly designed and does not self-fill without intervention. The biggest problem is the painfully slow manner in which new photos are added to the app. Each one must be individually approved through a three click process (minimum) and the app does not “learn” from the bird ID you’ve just entered. If I just selected Oak Tirmouse for the first of a set of photos all taken simultaneously, then Oak Titmouse should automatically be added to the list for confirmation of additional photos. Furthermore, the suggested species suggest a near-complete lack of understanding of bird behavior. Not all species come to feeders, so stop suggesting them actively and rather keep them in the database to be found if needed. I would much prefer if photos were automatically added to my phone’s photos like WhatsApp and others do but instead the BirdBuddy app forces you into a convoluted sharing process which puts their marketing goals above user ones. I remain hopeful that the makers of BirdBuddy will start listening to users, or else a competitor with better customer support will easily overtake them.

I love my BirdBuddy very much, but the recent updates have made the experience less pleasant. The update we just received at the end of October I absolutely hate. I now I have to scroll down a huge long line of full photographs to see all my daily visitors, where in the past the little pull down that just showed you everything very small and simple was very much preferred and much better. I also like the idea that we can now tap into other feeders around the world, but I don’t like that it puts those same pictures in the same collection area as my home postcards. There needs to be a separate section for personal postcards and then worldwide postcards. Also, I don’t like the update to the squirrel section, it used to have the same information that all the bird info shows and now it just says squirrel family with no information.

The feeder itself and the photos it captures are amazing, but the app leaves a lot to be desired. It isn’t native to iOS and doesn’t follow standard design patterns making it hard to navigate, but the most frustrating thing is the number of steps you have to take to process data from the feeder. I should just get to scroll through visits and decide what to throw out later, rather than having to go through what feels like a 10 step process just to save a single photo or video of a bird. If more thought was put into the app from a users perspective I think this product could be really amazing. It’s also frustrating to not be able to get the full resolution of the camera I paid for without a paid subscription. I’m fine with monetizing other services and features, but resolution shouldn’t be one of them when I bought the camera.

So fun to have the feeder up and get pics if our feathered friends. I do wish we had the ability to scroll through pictures, and we are having difficulty getting pictures of certain birds. I’ve seen cardinals and chickadees feeding, but no pics have come through so I guess they’re not sitting in the right spot. Battery life is poor , but future updates are supposed to address this AND it’s late October in Northern Michigan, so colder temps drain it faster. Overall, though, it’s fun to get new postcards and see who stopped by. So far we’ve got our regulars; Blue Jays, purple finch, goldfinch and a tufted titmouse. No one has eaten the suet yet, so no woodpecker pictures. Hoping for more variety as we go along…

Set up the feeder - lesser goldfinches discovered it within 10 minute! It’s annoying to not be able to delete postcard photos once they’re in a folder when the wrong bird was identified. Had to delete an allowed guest because all of his postcards automatically showed up in my own feed. There should be a way to identify postcards from guests separately and not have to look at them if I don’t want to. Had to ask the guest to remove me because I could figure out how to delete him from my guest access - nothing worked and it wasn’t intuitive on how to do it nor were there any specific instructions on how to do it. I have been trying to find a Western Scrub Jay in the app’s list of birds but it’s not even there. There should be an infinite list of birds from which to choose. The app developers still have a ways to go to make this a good app.

I enjoy watching my bird friends up close and personal and the bird buddy is great at up close photos. It’s also great at helping me identify my feathered friends. I love seeing what other buddies are capturing around the world. I find the interface to be a little clunky and disjointed. Its awkward and repetitive to collect each postcard. The camera is also pretty slow and often misses visitors that should be easy to photo. Trying to live stream is slow and choppy. It drops my video stream despite showing the wireless connection is very strong. This feels like a good beta that needs work on the software. I have other cheap security camera that are much more responsive than the bird buddy camera. I’d love to be able to connect one of my better cameras to the bird buddy system.

TLDR: It’s fun for novice birders. For a serious birder, the feeder is just ok, the camera is just ok, and the app is frustrating. The details: The feeder: The feeder can be tricky to fill, and I often have to poke a stick in through the bottom for the tray to refill. I added a couple screws to holes that were allowing nasty mold to accumulate under the perch. After one year, the clear plastic is damaged by the Texas sun and beginning to crack. The camera: Only needs charging every few days. The photos are mediocre. I do wish the resolution was better, or that the design didn’t result in dark, backlit birds. I would buy the solar upgrade, but I’m concerned about the longevity of the clear plastic. Algorithm: I’m annoyed by the id being wrong so often. It’s correct about 50% of the time, and it is tedious to fix the id manually. How many times do I have to correct a tufted titmouse to a black-crested, before black-crested comes up in suggestions? Every time, I have to search its name. Frequently misidentifies female cardinals as canyon towhees, which never visit my yard. Unless the wing is visible, white-winged does always get tagged mourning. Several times per day I get the hopeful “look, a new species!” alert, but they are the SAME misidentifications every time.

This Bird Buddy is a great idea. For the most part, this thing work great, but as most have said, it does miss some birds. I don’t know what triggers this thing to record and take pictures, but it does miss a lot. How do I know? I watch activity from my living room, so I know. The app is pretty clunky, not user friendly. Clicking through hundreds of “Postcards” can be annoying. Contrary to what some users have said, pictures can be deleted, but it takes to many clicks to get there. Other than that, I ordered a package with every accessory, but have yet to receive any of the accessories! The last comment; the solar panel works like a dream! No more charging for me! Overall, a great idea and great product! The app needs some work, but I would expect to see improvement forthcoming.

1.) Loses credentials twice in the past 2 days. Have to sign back in. Would be nice if the iPhone version of the app could pull from Apple password store. (iPad version appears to be able to use the apple saved password when signing in). This might be related to the second item. 2.) I have to force-quit and re-launch the app to get an update on the status of my device. Perhaps it will automatically update over time (I can’t tell), but if so, there needs to be a visual indication on when to expect an update. Every morning I open the app and see the battery level from the previous evening. 3.) when re-classifying birds, I sometimes get errors when saving, after successfully renaming several other pictures. Probably an API limit being hit, but the app needs to handle that better.

The overall idea of the smart feeder is nice, but the implementation so far needs a lot of work. In the app, there’s too much cutesiness in the cartoons, animation, and the idea of “postcards”. OK for the first day, but after that you just want to turn that off and get down to simple pictures. There also needs to be a way to turn off further pictures of birds already seen too many times. I don’t want any more pictures of the many tufted titmice that visit my feeder every day. But the main issue is battery life. I have to bring it in to recharge every other day, despite having the solar roof (which seems to provide very little charge).

These comments are about the app design, not the bird buddy hardware. If you have a busy feeder, you will quickly realize that going thru postcards then becomes a chore. It shouldn’t feel like this. Way too many clicks to sort thru birds or mark them mystery or bypass. All of the options should be on one screen when the bird comes up, not all these various screens to sort thru them. And for birds that the AI can’t recognize, the app doesn’t allow you to zoom in to see the bird clearer or close up. This is really a priority need in the next update. All the little graphics and animations are well done and adorable. But you need to be able to go quickly thru them if you want. It is a cool product, but the app needs some work to make it seem less like a chore, and not require so many steps to process postcards.

I have spent hours (literally) trying to set up my Birdbuddy (received as a gift 9 months after it was ordered!). Eventually got Bluetooth to connect after multiple attempts (including deleting account and app, reinstalling, and doing a factory reset on camera module). I then proceeded to try to connect to WiFi (following instructions carefully). App found my WiFi and said it would take up to 5 minutes to connect. After 5 minutes (there’s a countdown count), message indicated “hit a wall” and could not connect. Solution is to contact customer service. After reading all FAQs, I discovered the unit will only work with a 2G WiFi network - article says to select 2G version of your WiFi. I only have one WiFi option to select, and it’s 5G. Totally frustrated and annoyed with this entire process! Unless support gets back to me with a resolution, I’ll be returning this product for a refund.

The feeder fell from hook and cracked on my very first use. Also, the front plastic that holds the seed in won’t stay put and I had to tape it closed on the sides. The camera and photos are great but the feeder leaves much to be desired. The feeder is too small to accommodate woodpeckers apparently which are my favorite. I even put suet and peanuts in but none have landed on it. I have had it for 2 weeks and have woodpeckers on my other feeders (downy, flicker, red-bellied). The place where the birds land/perch is very smooth plastic and I am wondering if it is not easy for some birds to perch. The interface is a little cheesy/cutesy for my taste with animated birds telling you that you “have a postcard.” The app generally identifies birds correctly. I just think that for $200 it would be a sturdier feeder. It was a gift from my son and daughter in law. They were SO EXCITED to give it to me and they spent so much that I don’t want to tell them about it’s flaws.

I will admit that when I first got bird buddy it was a bit of a struggle to set up. The camera didn’t work correctly. We had to return and get it replaced. But then when we finally got a working camera. We bought some third-party attachments so that the birdhouse would sit securely. And after my millennial mania was over due to being terrible at fixing things this thing turned out to be amazing. I am the least handy person in Massachusetts and was able to rig the bird house so it’s secure on a pole. So if I can do this, 99.9% of the world can. I highly recommend getting the solar panel bird house so you don’t have to manually recharge every week. The pictures are high quality. The videos look like they’re 1080p, but don’t quote me on that. After a couple days we had birds coming to it constantly. Very cool how the app can identify them, or if you disagree with the species the app says then you can forward to the Bird Buddy team to confirm. I may buy a second one of these someday if the price dips.

I was worried after buying this for my wife for Christmas and seeing a bunch of bad reviews. Didn’t know what to expect and was prepared for the worst. That worry was unfounded. We got our BirdBuddy out of the box, powered it up, I added the solar roof, and we got it up and running and out in the yard within 15 minutes. The battery life is exceptional with the solar roof, but you have to position it correctly to catch the sun. It took a couple of days before we got a bird, but we were so excited to get our first video and photos. The clarity and detail is AMAZING. We’re in love, and my wife is really happy with it, which is a win for me :)

I purchased one of these about 2 years ago. I finally got it and after 10 days, I can say I’m pretty disappointed. The solar roof I have does not charge the unit. I have it facing south and I get plenty of Florida sun all day but no charge. The product is designed well, easy to set up and the app has a lot of potential. I have not had a single postcard or visitor recorded yet, despite having a medium to good Wi-Fi signal for the unit on my mesh network. Maybe I just haven’t had any visitors yet, who knows. I tried to link up with support and they’re so backed up, it’s at least 7 business days to get a response. I know there’s other similar products out there that support real-time recording and even night vision recording. I’m really hoping Birdbuddy can fix the issues with their product launch because they had so many excited backers to support them.

The app is not integrated well with IOS and does not allow for saving your password in keychain. A lot of unnecessary cartoon like crap instead of direct information feed. Lose the postcard crap and cartoony graphics. The photos collected are only available in this proprietary software, and are not available in your photo library. They therefore cannot be edited, exported or used in any other manner than to view within the application. HUGE DOWNCHECK! This alone drops the overall experience to one star. They wasted significant money on the development of bird recognition, a capability which already exists in the scientific community with vast databases and is already available to birders (The Merlin app). Direct integration with Merlin and eBird and collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology would have been a vastly more desirable approach. Not clear whether this happens in this application or the feeder itself, but there is extremely overly selective filtering of when a photo is taken. I can watch my feeder for 30 minutes and see 12 different species visit 40 or 50 times and get zero photos. Would much rather be offered many photos I could filter myself. In short, the combination of this app and the bird buddy is a toy, not truly useful equipment for the serious birder.

We get lots of birds but not many pictures. I emailed their support team and was told the birds need to be on the center of the perch and that their AI needs to deem the picture “interesting”. The only bird out of the dozen or so landing on the feeder that’s it feels is interesting is the black capped chickadee. There are many birds landing on it that are way more interesting. As for the app itself, it is difficult to find my way around and not very intuitive. It does not allow for saving the password on my iPhone 12 Pro Max and have to re-enter my email address and password every time I open the app. It’s a great concept if it would work.

This was a great idea and after some minor glitches, I was able to get it up and running. The instructions for setup were not clear, I didn’t know if I needed to charge the unit before starting and wasn’t sure which direction to load the camera into the feeder. Every time I get a “postcard” or a new picture I get a drumroll and cymbal crash that I could do without. The battery only lasts for about 48 hours and then has to be recharged. The bird ID software is not very good. It identified a small house finch as a pileated woodpecker, which is huge. I do enjoy the pictures, but it would be nice if it would stop sending me postcards with the same birds over and over again and maybe just notify me if there was some new bird.

App and camera starting working shortly after set up and I began receiving “postcards” on my phone. So fun! The animations are clever and the identification of birds is pretty darn accurate. I love seeing which bird is visiting my Bird Buddy feeder. Make sure when you place your camera it’s not facing the sun so you won’t get backlighting. We mounted ours on a flag pole that we stuck in the ground, but you can hang it in a tree. You can slightly rotate the feeder until the photos are well-lit. We put ours in the flower bed just outside the kitchen window. Photos and videos are super clear and sharp, even when I zoom in. Great camera, great app, fun for bird lovers!

Great app concept, but needs some improvements. The bird cards are fun in theory, however, they become tedious after your 15th squirrel of the day where you cannot bypass it unless you opened the individual squirrel card. You can get stuck in a bit of a click loop within the cards because it’s not entirely intuitive. I’m hoping this gets read by the devs or pm, it would be great if you could bypass cards of the same visitor, when you select ‘ignore this visitor’ in fact I’m not even sure that functionality does anything at the moment. I used to do development testing for work. Please reach out if I can help with this further. I want you guys to succeed!

I understood I was buying from a start up. I know that means there will be glitches. The bird buddy itself is plagued with issues. Since this is a review of the software I will focus on that. You have to log in multiple times a day with no “remember me” feature. I needed to do a complete reboot of the unit at least 3 times (not sure if that is software or the actual camera). The AI in identifying birds has been mostly accurate but it’s difficult changing the description. When everything works, it’s great, unfortunately that is less time than it not working. Fingers crossed it improves.

I never thought that I would get so much pleasure from a bird feeder. My daughter and son-in-law gave this to us after observing our feeders in action. I installed close to a window in our main room and can fill it and recharge the battery through the window. I have been getting twenty or more pictures each day and finally know the names of all my frequent visitors. I have enjoyed the posts of other Bird Buddy owners through Facebook and Instagram and have learned even more there. For someone who did not think I wanted anything more this has been great. Definitely recommend

I have gotten some really nice pictures. It really matters where you have it placed in terms of light. With all cameras, light matters. My first pic was my best. Also have seen pictures in community with awful backgrounds including garbage cans. Hilarious. Best to think about placement. I bought hot bird seed that squirrels don’t like but is safe for birds. It’s winter in the northeast and the cardinals and bluejays are big and don’t seem drawn to it. Too soon to really decide if I give it another star but it’s fun. Battery life is terrible. 2 days tops and $70 for a solar top is not ok. Also I made my pictures private and then decided to share a few in community but no way can I figure it out. So far pretty fun

LOVING the feeder! Have been enjoying watching birds that have shown up as early as the day following the installation. The quality of pictures is amazing. One downside is that the small song birds we have like to jump INTO the tray to eat rather than sitting in the perch so we get many pictures and videos of their backs rather than their faces. Guess we need to provide them with a little training! 😂 Would greatly appreciate a tutorial on how to use the app. It has been through trial and error that we are figuring things out and I would hate to think I may be missing out on some features that it provides. What a great way to watch the birds!

I’m really enjoying this thing. The hardware does what it says, but the app needs some work. First thing I would do is make the postcards optional. Opening card after card is time consuming and tedious. They should give us the option of a postcard per species, or just one long feed of all the visitors. Second thing I would do provide the ability to block specific species. The majority of time in the app is spent opening and deleting pics of starlings and grackles. I have deleted way more pics of starlings and grackles than all other species that I’ve kept. Since the software recognizes species, it would be nice to not have to open and delete pic after pic of species I don’t want.