For the Birds

Who knew a bird feeder with a built-in camera would be such a time suck?

You oughta be in pictures....

When the Bird Buddy feeder arrived it was capable of taking pictures of birds at the feeder and applying artificial intelligence to identify the species. It was pretty good at that. After a while, though, You realize a few things:

There is a common set of birds that will come to your feeder (eight species in my case).
Some come OFTEN (finches and juncos in my case).
The rest don't

One day I received notification of a software update that included a beta version of video capture. Things became a lot more interesting.

Birds are highly evolved to remove seeds from shells.. It's hypnotizing.
There is a "pecking order" in the bird world. Some birds push out others, then get pushed out themselves.
Bird life is tougher than you think. A couple of finches are missing one eye!

The video sequence chronicles most of the feeder activity the camera captured between 12/28/22 and 1/7/23. The clips are in time sequence so you will see a lot of snow accumulating. We received over 15" during this period.

Still, it does take nice stills

The still photos Bird Buddy captures are pretty neat, if not repetitive. I keep lookout for any new species or interesting shots. Below is a lineup of my current visitor roster.