Way back in the pre-pandemic times, I backed a Kickstarter project for a very good idea: Bird Buddy.
It’s a bird feeder but also has a camera that takes photos and lets you stream live video, plus WiFi, and a battery. Mine finally shipped and showed up, so I set it up down the hill from my house where birds would hopefully be more comfortable away from people.
Now that I’ve had it for a month or so, I will say birds are using it much less than I thought they would, but I think that’s due to location and I may move it closer to our garden where birds are more abundant.
What is the greatest is when you unlock your phone and see a notification that a new bird visited, and after launching the app it will show you new photos as a gift you have to tap to open, then it uses AI to identify the kind of bird that visited your feeder.
I kind of love this product more than I even thought I would. It’s really fun to get photos of new bird species from your yard.
A Whole Lotta Nothing 
We’ve been pretty happy with ours. I’m still working on good placement to avoid harsh lighting or blowouts but that’s probably going to be a v2 camera improvement.
The mood is great – just a different perspective than I have ever taken before: https://share.icloud.com/photos/045OaZIAwuDaNfSBGgFPZkGWA
We have the opposite problem it sounds like you have: our feeder gets busy, which meant the battery lasts about a day.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/019fVERJFOMSjpY1lM5mp5cXA
I bought the solar roof later and installed it this morning so I’m hoping that’ll stretch things out.
I’ve also been sending feedback to the developers about alert fatigue. I’ll get notifications every 10 minutes and it’s the same sparrow, and the postcard UI gets tedious when you’re repeating it 40 times. They say they’re working on it, so hopefully that will be improved soon. I’m hoping to get it over the Grammie threshold where she can talk with my son about his east coast birds but not have her phone buzzing constantly.
The other thing I’ve been asking about is getting larger pictures faster. The categorization UI is hard with such small thumbnails and not having a way to zoom or go full screen in the app seems like an odd oversight.
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