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Meet Bird Buddy, a hi-tech bird feeder that feeds birds while also capturing their portraits.
Hardcore birdwatchers armed with binoculars and spotting scopes will travel hundreds of miles to catch a glimpse of a new species. Other bird enthusiasts simply enjoy seeing their feathered friends gather around a backyard feeder. If said enthusiasts are lucky, they might snap a decent picture of their winged visitors through a telephoto lens. But anyone who’s tried it knows how hard it can be: small birds can inconveniently fly off at any moment.
Enter Bird Buddy, a hi-tech bird feeder made of lightweight blue or yellow plastic that lets you feed birds and simultaneously get crisp, close-up shots of them with a tiny rechargeable camera that magnetically attaches to the nine-inch tall unit.
Using Bluetooth and your home Wi-Fi connection, Bird Buddy will automatically detect the bird’s presence and send pictures (“postcards”) to the Bird Buddy app on your smartphone. You save or delete the postcards by swiping right or left on the image, Tinder-style, and you can share your best shots with other Bird Buddy users.
You can also live-stream the activity on the feeder, watch the action in real time on your phone, and save the videos in the app. The app has useful information about 452 common and rare bird species, so your avian knowledge grows as your photo collection expands.
Even better, Bird Buddy’s inventors aim to share the data collected by users to support research on bird populations and movements in the face of habitat loss and climate change.
