Bird Buddy: Tap Into Nature Reviews

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 BirdBuddy are brand new so everyone should expect some kinks. The company has been great about sending out email updates and keeping people informed. BirdBuddy 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 BirdBuddy 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!

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 BirdBuddy 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 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 BirdBuddy .

There are other minor issues I think they could work on, but overall I am very happy.

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 BirdBuddy ’s list of birds but it’s not even there. There should be an infinite list of birds from which to choose. BirdBuddy developers still have a ways to go to make this a good app.

1.) Loses credentials twice in the past 2 days. Have to sign back in. Would be nice if the iPhone version of BirdBuddy 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 BirdBuddy 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 BirdBuddy 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 BirdBuddy needs to handle that better.

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.

These comments are about BirdBuddy 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, BirdBuddy 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 BirdBuddy needs some work to make it seem less like a chore, and not require so many steps to process postcards.

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.

The hardware is fantastic. BirdBuddy is… fine. My biggest complaint is how many times I have to tap and tap my screen to look at pictures of ONE bird. The postcard idea is a cute gimmick, but I actually think being married to the postcards as a delivery method gets in the way of enjoying the photos. I check BirdBuddy and find 10 postcards… each one has the same slow animation, and then I have to verify and save the photos. And then BirdBuddy dumps me in the gallery rather than the home scream so then I have to tap again… free idea: make it a social media style feed. Or better yet, a Tinder style feed. Because while I love the photos, the labyrinthine process of taps makes me want to use BirdBuddy less.

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…

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 BirdBuddy 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 this app can fix the issues with their product launch because they had so many excited backers to support them.

I am really enjoying my this app! I love that it identifies birds and gives you tons of information about them. I also love some of the really comical photos I’ve gotten! :-) I’ve only had my this app a few weeks, but I would suggest an option that allows you to set a timer on how often the camera takes photos of birds. Sometimes at the end of the day I’ll have dozens of postcards, and it can be quite time consuming to go through each postcard, and then act upon whether I want to keep it or not.
Otherwise, BirdBuddy does exactly what it states and gives you the opportunity to take close-up photos of birds you wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

BirdBuddy 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 BirdBuddy and the bird buddy is a toy, not truly useful equipment for the serious birder.

All in all, Bird Buddy is an impressive combination of hardware and software, but it’s a young product that’s only just now getting put through its paces at any real scale. Managing postcards and galleries in BirdBuddy isn’t super intuitive and it often forces user behaviors that I don’t want to do. Not having the ability to silence or reduce notifications about very common birds is a miss; I don’t love having to manage multiple postcards per day of the same species, and it lessens the delight of getting notifications. Happy to be an early adopter because I’m familiar with the challenges of product and software development, but a lot of people will find this frustrating in its current form.

App needs help but it is still relatively new. Hoping for many improvements over time.
On the plus side, it seems to mostly identify birds straightaway and organizes them nicely. So far no app crashes and setup/updates to the camera have been easy.
Areas for improvement: UI not very intuitive, especially when not being able to identify a bird. There should be an obvious way to save mystery birds to a folder for future research. Also please let us zoom in on a postcard without having to download to a camera roll. We could probably identify a bird if it wasn’t on a tiny postage stamp-sized image.

Forget any negative reviews. I backed this project on kickstarter and waited almost two years, thinking I’d never see my buddy. In just two days I’ve been nothing but blown away. It’s everything I wanted and was promised from unboxing to setup it’s a new standard. I love my buddy and the friends who visit! Learn more about each of them or see more photos from other feeders - it just works. Updating my review to point out: it’s winter so the solar panel is a bit slow. In a few days here it’ll be late December and the days grow longer again…

I took my time setting it up and it is working great!
I need to recharge every other day since there is little sun in Northern Ohio in December. I love seeing the notification of a new postcard and seeing up close our flighty friends! BirdBuddy is pretty good.. there are a few quirky responses when you make certain selections but overall I can figure it out!

The response team answered my ‘mystery bird’ request. I did wait a long time for the device but now that it is here, I love it! Can’t wait for spring when the fun will really begin!

Bird Buddy is astoundingly good! Yes the software still needs some refinement but that will surely come. However to have this amazing AI in your own back yard to select good photos, identify birds visiting the feeder and then send you a postcard with photos is really great!
It took a few days for birds to get used to the feeder. Also about the same time for squirrels so I’m now working on squirrel obstacles for the support post. But then the visitor postcards start flowing which you can album yourself privately or with others and look at others’ photos.
The solar roof seems a must otherwise the battery would need daily recharging.
I also had to install a weatherproof wifi extender ($60) for a short yard.
In overall terms though this is a really great addition to the internet of things if you’re interested in identifying which birds come to feed in your back yard.
Thank you Bird Buddy!

I think I originally rated BirdBuddy 3 stars. After using it for a while I’m downgrading it to 1 star. I’m not sure what the developers were thinking with their postcard concept. I have way to many to open. You have to wait for the rainbow to see your pics. If you inadvertently save a photo you can not delete it later. The longer it is in use, the more unidentified birds I get…when it is the same three species. Please change it to one feed of pictures that I can keep or delete. If I mark them as a mystery and collect them I want to be able to change the name later. Again…let users delete pictures we’ve previously collected. Now that I have a lot of photos I’d like to delete some.

this app gives an exceptional close-up view of birds. The physical device -- bird feeder with camera -- is truly Great. BirdBuddy 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. this app, 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.

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 BirdBuddy ) 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. BirdBuddy 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 BirdBuddy 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.

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 BirdBuddy 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 BirdBuddy /process)

I have a very active feeder with a generally the same population of birds/species visiting regularly. BirdBuddy treats each of those as a “present” for me to open/reveal. After a busy week of not tending to BirdBuddy I now have hundreds of these presents to open. I want BirdBuddy 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) BirdBuddy design is tiresome and saps the joy from using my feeder.

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 BirdBuddy 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. BirdBuddy 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. BirdBuddy can be shared with three people who can see your post cards but not the live feed.

The concept is very cool, of course. But BirdBuddy 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.

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 enjoy the bird feeder so far, but I don’t have a good user experience within BirdBuddy. 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??

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 BirdBuddy . 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…

The photos are fantastic, but BirdBuddy ’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 BirdBuddy . Each one must be individually approved through a three click process (minimum) and BirdBuddy 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 this app app forces you into a convoluted sharing process which puts their marketing goals above user ones.

I remain hopeful that the makers of this app will start listening to users, or else a competitor with better customer support will easily overtake them.

Edit: postcards are finally coming through with the last camera update. The camera had to be reset and BirdBuddy 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

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. BirdBuddy 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! BirdBuddy needs some work, but I would expect to see improvement forthcoming.

My mother loves birds, and loves all the features of BirdBuddy. 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 BirdBuddy 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.

Great gift for a bird lover; the integral solar panel makes it almost perfect. Now to get to 5 stars. Directions have pictures of perches for birds - there were no perches in my box but you can find hundreds of options in Etsy. Suggest changing the photos in the directions so people don’t go crazy looking for the parts. Navigation is confusing. If you have multiple photos in a bird “postcard”: it looks like if you skip them, they are deleted. There should be an option to not record the same bird you’ve seen before. We have 500 sparrows as dependents. List of birds should be able to be present it as just a list of names to sort by date or alphabetical as opposed to photos. When you look at a live stream, it APPEARS unless you close it out; this suspends recording.
Added 8/7/23 I don’t care if the sparrows are trying to communicate to me via American Sign Language - I do not need another sparrow photo taken!!!

I was a fan and supporter of the this app 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.

BirdBuddy is fine and I haven’t had any significant issues. Set up was difficult, but I got it working.
My issues are with durability of the feeder itself. Given that there is no way to review the feeder on their site, brilliant idea for dissatisfied customers, I am going to go into great detail here. First, they stopped sending out the screw that attached the camera to the feeder and relied on a magnet to hold it in. I am in Ohio and maybe our squirrels are a little more robust, but they pulled it out in less than a week. They then chewed the multifunction button almost entirely off. That solar panel roof? Oh yeah, the engineer decided that running the cable outside the feeder would be a great option. Guess what?! Squirrels got to that too and chewed through it. Then, the mounting base broke.
Now, customer service has told me it isn’t intended for squirrels, I know, I wanted birds. I followed all of the directions for keeping this feeder squirrel free, but it didn’t work. If you feel so inclined, go to their website and read the section on durability. Yeah, not durable at all. This was a Father’s Day gift from my wife because I am a bird nerd. Now I am constantly left trying to repair a $300+ bird feeder because Bird Buddy won’t help me. Also, if you want replacement warranty parts it will take WEEKS/MONTHS to get what you need. I really hope this informs some of you prospective buyers/owners. It is a rough deal.

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 BirdBuddy 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 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. BirdBuddy also has communities all over the world. Very impressive!