The tech world has been taken over by a bird feeder that takes pictures of each hungry animal that comes to eat.
When “Pokémon Go,” the app game where people can find and collect pocket monsters in the real world, came out a little more than five years ago, the whole world went crazy overnight. People seemed to see people staring at their phones while trying to catch a Charmander everywhere they went.
The Pokémon Go app wasn’t very popular for long, but the idea lives on in Bird Buddy, a new bird feeder that you can control with your phone.
Bird Buddy is a big hit at this year’s CES, which used to be called the Consumer Electronics Show. It takes great pictures of real wildlife and can also be played as a fun and educational game.
At the Las Vegas Convention Center, CES goes on until January 8.
Bird Buddy is a bird feeder with a camera that works with an app, like a Ring doorbell. You put it outside your house. When birds fly up to the feeder to eat, the app’s motion detector turns on, and it then takes photos and videos.
The app tells you when a new bird has come to the feeder. But if you miss a visitor, the app will send a postcard with a picture of your new guest if you do. The basic model can be charged with a USB-C cable, but you can also upgrade it to run on solar power so you don’t have to charge it as often.
The company says that the app’s AI technology can find up to 1,000 different kinds of birds. Bird Buddy came up with the technology after it looked at about 3 million photos. An ornithologist led a group of interns who went through 2 million of these to teach the AI how to identify birds.
The company’s co-founder and chief hardware officer, Kyle Buzzard, told the Associated Press, “We try to make it more like a game so it’s fun to play.” He compared it to Pokémon Go, but with real animals and wildlife in your backyard.
The cool thing is that, unlike Pokémon Go, where you collect digital creatures in the real world, Bird Buddy lets you learn about and collect real animals.
The company began as a Kickstarter project in 2020, and since then, all of its 100,000 feeders have been sold. The simplest feeder kit costs $199.
Bird Buddy showed off its new hummingbird feeder at this year’s CES. It can take photos and videos of more than 350 species of hummingbirds flying up to 60 mph. People should be able to buy the feeder by the end of 2023.
Bird Buddy is a fun way to get people who might not otherwise watch birds to do so. As its technology improves, it could become a great way for conservationists to keep track of different species because it is always watching where birds go.
Buzzard told TechCrunch, “We get timestamps, and we know the species and we know — generally — the location based on the town that you put in,” Buzzard said according to TechCrunch. “We’re building the largest database of bird visits.”