Spring Welcomes our Feathered Friends
Here in western Michigan, the sun is finally making an appearance and the winter’s cold is fading. That signals the time for the migrating birds to make their way back to our northern location.
Reaching back to Christmas, my wife received a gift that is perfect for this warming weather.
It’s called BirdBuddy.
This is a bird feeder with addition of a built-in camera.
She was anxious to see how it works but we thought it best to wait until the weather was more hospitable to the both the birds and to me (I’d have to get it working in the cold).
The BirdBuddy has a solar panel roof to power the camera. While we’ve used it only a few days, we’re not sure if the panel will charge the unit without having to use conventional USB charging.
The camera has a motion sensor to start recording when a bird (or other animal) approaches the unit.
Assembly is simple – snap the front and rear feed walls to the blue platform, attach the roof, insert the camera unit front facing into its slot and add some bird feed.
After downloading the BirdBuddy app from the internet you set up an account with your email address and finally connect the unit to your wi-fi network.
When we had it assembled and were ready to go, we hung the unit in the backyard.
Sure enough an hour later we had a feathered visitor.
The BirdBuddy app notified us and sent this message with a picture of the unidentifed bird.
When we clicked Identify this visitor we were told that the bird is a House Finch.
We were both surprised that BirdBuddy actually records a video when the motion detector kicks in.
Here’s a short clip of the House Finch munching on some seeds.
We’re happy that this BirdBuddy is now ready to serve up more sightings as Spring continues to bring more visitors back to Michigan.
If you’re interested find more information about BirdBuddy here.
Written by:
Arnie Lee