Bird Buddy Review: Birdwatching Made Easy

The main goal of Bird Buddy is to detect and identify bird species using artificial intelligence. It does this better than Birdfy, but still has its drawbacks. I get what appears to be hundreds of pigeons in my feeders a day – in fact it’s probably 10 to 20 of the same one – and no matter how many times in a row he correctly identifies them as mourning pigeons, every so many he says they are white-winged or turtle doves. At least those misidentifications were closer than Birdfy’s (they’re all from the pigeon family!), but it can still be frustrating. I have had several specimens of several species together in photographs and have so far been able to identify only one of the flock.

What I like is that the app includes a list of birds that can be an item, so you can easily figure out which one is the right one. If that doesn’t help, you can give it to experts to decrypt. (Recently, I introduced a few mysterious visitors, but still have not received a response.)

Bird Buddy makes bird watching from home a joy. Not only can I find out exactly what species are frolicking on my balcony, but I can also find out about them right in the app. I learned that these mourning doves often snack on snails (disgusting) and hoard food (same thing); dark-eyed juncos are not very friendly (sad); and domestic finches have great memories (I hope they love me).

You can even listen to their songs, which is especially helpful since the videos don’t include audio – video is a new feature that was only enabled towards the end of my testing and I really appreciate this addition. I see this as a great resource for kids as well as people like me who are desperate to learn about the animals they love without going out for a walk at 8am with strangers.

Air Bad

I love that the Bird Buddy app organizes photos and videos by type so you can view them later. It also makes a game of collecting birds like Pokemon cards. However, the way new events are presented to you quickly becomes outdated. In your feed, you can see that a new “postcard” is waiting for you. Clicking on the postcard will show you a cute animation before letting you know what kinds of birds were there and allowing you to view a gallery that includes some photos and videos.

When there was more than one postcard, which is usually the case, having to scroll through the animation each time became quite annoying. I would like to set it up so that it only does this for new views that appear, otherwise just let me know there are new images for those already found. I would have been much happier if he had said something along the lines of “more pigeons in your feeder” instead of opening six postcards with multiple photos of the same.