Create a Garden-Sized Bird Surveillance State With This Smart Bird Feeder
· Vice
Free as a bird, so the saying goes. No rent to pay, no 9-5 job to work. Vacations to the tropics are free every winter, if you don’t mind a little flying. Oh, and the flying. No middle seats or surly, crying children as you jostle down a jetliner’s narrow aisle every hour just to avoid deep vein thrombosis. And all the nuts and seeds you can gorge yourself on. Those lucky birds don’t even have to deal with the creeping advance of a Big Brother-type of nanny state that plasters AI-infused security cameras over every public space.
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Seems a little unfair, doesn’t it? Give those backyard birds a taste of what it’s like to be a human while you’re also giving them a taste of free seeds to lure them right up to the Netvue by Birdfy Smart Bird Feeder’s 1080p video camera. You don’t even need to take out a line of credit. It’s on a sale for Mother’s Day: $100, down by half from its $200 retail price, but $30 below its more typical, recent street price of $130.
(opens in a new window) BirdfyNetvue Smart Bird Feeder (opens in a new window)
$99.99 (reg. $199.99) at Amazon Buy Now (opens in a new window)bird (super)watching
Nobody’s saying that viewing your backyard birds as they munch the seed you lay out should replace the pleasures of sitting on your back porch and watching them in three real dimensions. The camera, at least how I think of it, is a supplemental curiosity that gives you the satisfaction of a bit of added knowledge on which visitors are dropping by your backyard.
The Birdfy smart feeder can alert you through notifications when a bird lands for lunch, and it’ll also save 20-second videos of feathered visitors for up to 30 days without charging you for cloud storage. The ace up its sleeve is an AI-powered (like everything, these days) bird recognition feature that helps you identify which species of bird land on the feeder but you’ve got to pay for it.
The AI Bird Recognition Subscription runs $5 per month, $49 per year, or $70 if you pay for a lifetime subscription. There’s a slightly discounted plan that identifies only hummingbirds, which is one of the most out-there and weirdest things I’ve read in this job all day (a major feat), but then again you just read all the way to the bottom of an article about not just watching birds, but making sure they know they’re being watched. So you tell me what’s strange and what’s not.
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