The Bird Buddy from CES 2023 isn't the only bird feeder camera, but it might be the best
AI smarts and cool accessories could make the most adorable form of surveillance a cut above
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Birdveillance
🕊️ Bird Buddy is a 720p bird house camera that snaps pics of birdie visitors
🔔 Bird Buddy notifies you of a bird visitor so you know it’s there
👀 You can then watch video or look at pics of the bird, choose to save them
🧠 AI smarts identify the bird for you
🧑🔬 The bird data can be used to help track bird migration and population
The Bird Buddy camera is old, by CES standards – its release pre-dates CES 2023 by 3 months, when it announced to Indiegogo supporters that it had started shipping product, and it was written about as long ago as mid-2021 at Bob Vila. It even won a CES Innovation Award last year. But it’s my favorite product at the show so far, and I’m going to have a hard time not justifying shoehorning it into our best smart home security cameras list.
It’s not even the only birdhouse camera. A cursory search on Amazon revealed plenty more, and most of which have mediocre-to-bad reviews, if they have them at all.
The Bird Buddy is a premade bird house with a battery-powered 2K camera inside of it. The camera talks to the Bird Buddy app on your phone, and somewhere in there an AI wakes up every time a bird flops down onto the feeder, snaps a picture, then does its best to identify the little guy for you.
You’ll then get a push notification on your phone letting you know a bird has come to call, letting you check it out, watch a livestream from the camera, and save the image to your Bird Buddy photo album. It even has a microphone so you can listen to the bird’s chirps (I’m guessing mostly the sound is thumping and pecking as it eats).
Bird Buddy says it can recognize over 1,000 species of bird, and the company says it uses the information from Bird Buddy to help track migration and population density of bird species, so you’re not just getting the cutest little surveillance camera around – you’re helping SCIENCE!
Bird Buddy offers several different types of food holder, accessories like a solar roof for prolonged battery, and a variety of optional mounts. The Bird Buddy is in pre-order and starts at $249.00 (though right now it’s 20% off at $199.00).