by The main purpose of the Bird Buddy is to detect and identify species of birds using its artificial intelligence. It does that better than the Birdfy, but still has its mix-ups. I get what feels like hundreds of pigeons at my feeders every day – in reality it’s probably 10 to 20 of the same kind – and no matter how many times in a row they’re correctly identified as mourning doves, there are always enough of them to indicate that they’re white-winged or Eurasian collared pigeons. At least those misidentifications came closer than Birdfy’s (they all belong to the pigeon family!), but it can still be frustrating. I’ve had a few cases of multiple species photographed together, and so far only one in the flock has identified it.
One thing I like is that the app comes with a list of birds that could be the subject too, so you can easily figure out which one is the right one. If that doesn’t help, you can submit it to the experts for decryption. (I recently reported some mystery visitors but haven’t received a response yet.)
Bird Buddy makes birding fun from the comfort of your own home. I can not only understand exactly which species are romping around on my balcony, I can also find out about them directly in the app. I’ve learned that these grieving doves often snack on snails (yuck) and hoard their food (same); dark-eyed juncos are not very friendly (sadly); and house finches have excellent memories (I hope they love me).
You can even listen to their songs, which is especially helpful since the videos don’t include sound – video is a new feature that wasn’t enabled until towards the end of my testing, and I really appreciate the addition. I could see it being a great resource for kids, but also for people like me who are dying to learn about the animals they love without going on an 8am birding hike with strangers.
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Video: Medea Giordano on Bird Buddy
I like that Bird Buddy’s app organizes photos and videos by species, which makes it nice to look back on later. It also makes a bird collecting game Pokemon Cards. However, the way new events are presented to you quickly becomes outdated. Your feed shows that a new “postcard” is waiting for you. If you click on the postcard, a cute animation will appear before telling you what species of bird was there and you can cycle through the gallery, which contains several photos and videos.
When there was more than one postcard, which is usually the case, having to go through the animation each time became quite tiresome. I wish I could just set it up for new species that appear and otherwise just let me know there are new images for those already found. I would be much happier if it said something like “more pigeons have been at your feeder” rather than having to open six postcards each with multiple photos of the same pigeons.
