Smart Bird Feeders Connect Us to Wildlife —and Each Other—Like Never Before

Though I moved away from my home state 30 years ago, I still miss the noise of a Georgia backyard. We’ve got plenty of bird sounds to enjoy here in Oregon, but come spring, I find myself dialing up my Atlanta kin and hoping they answer from the porch or while walking the neighborhood. Those chords of southern birdsong—the freepereee of Eastern Towhees and the peterpeter of Tufted Titmice—ring a bell in my heart, even when the sound is compressed and sent through a cell phone.

Now my phone gets me even closer to the birds of my youth. Earlier this year, Audubon asked me to explore the recent rise of “smart” bird feeders and learn what roles these devices play in bird lovers’ lives. Equipped with built-in cameras and wifi connections, these souped-up feeders record avian visitors snacking on seeds or nectar and then send the image files to slick mobile apps. I was initially wary of downloading one more distracting app—I’d been trying to “consciously uncouple” with my phone for months—but the chance to get some southern birdsong in my pocket while connecting with my long-distance family won out.  

I messaged my brother Nick, who shares a nice Georgia backyard with his wife, Emily, and my three ultra-cute niblings. Would he have the time and bandwidth to set up a high-tech feeding station? “I’m super pumped,” Nick texted back. “Gonna watch some birbs when I’m supposed to be working.”

I sent him the latest generation of the Bird Buddy feeder, which he installed on a hook that faces his kitchen window. We both downloaded the company’s app so I could link with his feeder’s, uh, feed. Within minutes of setup, my phone trilled: “A new species just showed up at the feeder!” Seconds later, a text from Nick: “Did you get the notification about the bluebird?” I opened the app, and there he was: an Eastern Bluebird, riffling through seed mix with aplomb, captured in a triptych of two snapshots and a movie short.

To misquote Gloria Swanson, I wasn’t ready for this close-up. Never have I had the opportunity to count the feathers on a bluebird’s azure cap or marvel at the inward turn of its toes. In the video, the bluebird hops into the structure, standing close to the HDR camera. I could see the bird’s surprisingly muscular back tense and slacken. When he launched from the feeder, the force caused it to swing widely, and the camera caught a glimpse of my brother’s backyard grill, while a half dozen other birds sang outside of the frame.

The moment produced a jolt of ­emotion—not homesickness so much as a home exhale. It wasn’t only the bluebird that thrilled me; it was knowing Nick was just beyond that kitchen window with his family, too. That’s when I recognized why these cool gadgets have become so popular. They’re not just connecting us to our birds—they’re also connecting us to our people.  

Since the advent of still and motion cameras in the 19th century, people have used imaging technology to observe wildlife. But the rise of web cameras in the mid-1990s presented a supercharged opportunity to observe the planet’s other animals, anywhere and anytime. In 1998 Africam’s “online watering hole” began offering a view of Kruger National Park, including dramatic images of lion attacks and hyena fights that were seen in real time on every continent. “Why go to the zoo or aquarium if the zoo can come to you?” wondered The New York Times two years later. By then, anyone could sit in their cubicle and watch an elephant birth at the Indianapolis Zoo or daily panda feedings in San Diego.

This was around the time my alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh, trained a camera on a Peregrine Falcon nest on the tallest building on campus. I’d recently moved away, and it was fun and novel to virtually check in from the vantage of a bird perched a few stories above my old French classroom. The falcon cam’s footage was poor by today’s standards: grainy, Cops-caliber shots of a gray blot (Dorothy the Peregrine) and three smaller blots (her hatchlings). Like other nature cams of the era, the feed updated only twice per minute, so tuning in felt like watching a laggy stop-motion film.  

Then, as it does, technology leapt forward. Image quality improved. Advancements in solar batteries and satellite reception allowed for more remote camera placements. At home, faster internet made streaming easier. The better tech and distribution networks brought the drama front and center: live-action territory fights, courtship dances, parenting dramas, and graphic acts of predation. This intensity soon bred a cast of wildlife cam celebrities.  

For more than a decade, viewers have tuned in to keep tabs on beloved couples like Rachel and Steve, a pair of Ospreys  that nested at the Hog Island Audubon Camp in Maine. They’ve monitored wildlife hot spots including Alaska’s Katmai National Park, where brown bears fish at Brooks Falls each summer. Reporters now regularly cover the trials of Jackie and Shadow, two Bald Eagles in California who went viral in 2023 while tending their nest through a harrowing winter. Tens of thousands of online fans submitted suggestions to name the pair’s latest eaglets, ultimately dubbed Sunny and Gizmo.  

Followers aren’t simply watching these #famous creatures; they’re discussing them and contributing to science. Within months of the brown bear cam launch at Katmai, thousands had logged on to the livestream and made friends with one another. “We were amazed how quickly a community developed,” says Mike Fitz, now a resident naturalist for the nonprofit Explore.org, which hosts a network of livestream nature cams. And with viewers clocking in at all hours to form 24/7 stakeouts, cam devotees are often the first to spot noteworthy animal behavior—and, once, a lost hiker. Experts also engage with these cam communities, answering questions and harvesting wildlife data from a trove of crowdsourced photos, which are captured live and saved by users. A fan post about Katmai’s zaftig bears even helped spur the now-popular Fat Bear Week tournament. (Shout-out to 2024’s chonky champ, Grazer. I was pulling for you, bud!)

The biggest boom in wildlife watching came during the COVID-19 pandemic. As I learned to work from home, I flipped through nature cams like they were cable channels,  toggling from a South African penguin colony to Audubon’s Crane Cam in Nebraska to toucans at a fruit feeder in Panama. And when I wasn’t web surfing, I was tuned in to the avian inhabitants outside my window. Many people self-soothed in similar ways: Engagement on Explore.org doubled in the first six months of 2020, and interest in traditional backyard bird feeding also soared. By 2022 a whopping 91 million U.S. residents were watching birds close to home, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey.

As the pandemic waned, the smart feeder made its well-timed entrance. New bird enthusiasts could buy a gadget that married some of the delights of traditional animal livestreams—the ability to unobtrusively observe nature through a memetic, shareable technology—with the personal appeal of turning the lens on the birds outside our homes. It didn’t take long for feeder owners to become a little obsessed.  

For most of his life, Matt Perkins didn’t have birds on his radar. That changed last year, when the Colorado-based handyman and DJ played a few rounds of Wingspan at a friend’s place. The board game opened his eyes to the avifauna around him. Inspired to explore birds in real life, he googled “bird feeders,” and a model with a camera popped up.

Though he’d never had a birdwatching device before, Perkins quickly became a devotee of his Osoeri feeder cam. The app’s notifications, he says, are “sometimes the best part of my day.” While he’s on a job, they supply hits of ornithological dopamine. If his phone dings while he’s at home, it’s permission to take a cup of coffee to the window and watch. Within a month, he’d given devices to three friends. “Once I figured out we could view each other’s birds, I got so excited,” he says.  

With their easy use and photogenic payoffs, the feeders appeal to both newbies and seasoned birders. “It’s kind of like the Fabergé shampoo commercial,” says Oregon backyard birdwatcher Michelle Campoli. “You tell two friends, and they tell two friends.” In the evenings, she reviews her day’s photo cache for ­giggle-worthy snaps—the fish-eye angle of the lens is “just a smile generator,” she says. She sends me two meme-able shots as proof: a European Starling opening its beak wide enough for a full oral exam, and a Mourning Dove captured at such close range that it looks like a feathered snowman.  

Campoli’s feeder, like a number of models, uses AI technology to identify bird visitors. This feature, combined with a quality camera, can flatten a novice birder’s learning curve, with labeled images popping up on the app like quiz flash cards. All AI systems make errors, though, and while some are obvious—one “Common Grackle” photo on my app’s public feed was really a seed-stealing white-tailed deer—most are more subtle. Campoli sees the misidentifications as a learning opportunity. If an ID seems suspicious, she checks other reference texts or consults friends at her local seed supply store, and “this elevates my bird skills.” By correcting the app, she notes, she’s helping AI models improve, too.

Environmental writer Ben Goldfarb—one of the recipients of Perkins’s feeder giveaway—enjoys how his smart feeder helps him spot rare gems in his yard in Salida, Colorado. He and his wife track all of their sightings, caught via camera or naked eye, on a whiteboard in their laundry room (the list was 52 species strong at press time). “I’ve never seen a Mountain Chickadee back there with my own eyes, but one shows up on the camera occasionally, so the camera reveals diversity that we otherwise wouldn’t notice,” he says. Goldfarb also appreciates the camera’s ability to capture fine details of animals and their interactions. “You see these personalities observed through their behavior.”  

Though they’re an investment, smart feeders can help make backyard birding even more accessible. Those with no outdoor space can tune in to a friend’s feed. Kids who struggle to hold binoculars, like my nieces and nephew, might find it easier to scroll through a camera roll. Seventy-nine-year-old Marcia Fisher says smart feeders are great for older birdwatchers, too. There was a time when she followed naturalists along Galveston’s waterfront, climbing hills and jumping over ditches. Now that her scrambling days are behind her, she’s “happy to stick with whatever comes to the backyard” and lands on her feeder cam in Texas.  

Fisher mentions her most treasured image: a male Northern Cardinal popping a sunflower seed into the beak of its mate. “Oh, it’s the neatest photo,” she tells me. “I’ll send it to you.”

Infectious sharing is crucial to smart feeder culture. My new friends and acquaintances have been sending me photos, which I forward along to others as we dish on hot-button yard topics like squirrel annoyances. But the most palpable benefit, for me, has been connecting with family. Over the past months, Nick and I have continued our cross-country bird chat, and we also exchange snaps with our cousin Michael, who uses his feeder to spot Painted Buntings and Pine Warblers in South Carolina. (“It’s like Pokémon for adults,” he jokes.)

My friend Aimee Nezhukumatathil, a writer in Mississippi, recently halted a dentist visit when she got a notification of a Ruby-throated Hummingbird at her yard’s Harymor feeder. “Look at what’s going on at my house right now!” she exclaimed (hopefully not with a mouth full of gauze). Perkins and Goldfarb have been swapping footage for more than a year, geeking out over showstopper clips like one of a Northern Flicker under Perkins’s feeder, extending its prodigious tongue up and over to lick suet at the top. “I was like, ‘Is this some kind of lizard?’ ” Perkins recalls.

Like the park rangers who run Fat Bear Week, poet and editor Michael Metivier has made social media stars out of his feeder visitors in Vermont. He likes to post videos to BlueSky that he matches with rollicking blues songs or obscure ’90s sitcom references, and he gives featured birds punchy nicknames, like Scarlet Joe Handsome and his curious mate, Cardi Bea. Meanwhile, Goldfarb likes to post during migration season—the pictures remind him of the tremendous effort it takes for, say, one Lazuli Bunting to arrive in his yard at all. “That photo you put on Instagram is the end product of one of the animal kingdom’s greatest biological achievements,” he says. “I find that beautiful to think about.”

The fun doesn’t have to stop when birders clock in to their jobs. In January, Audubon shorebird program manager Kara Durda started a #birdfeederandnestcameras channel on Audubon’s Slack workspace, used for internal communications. Though most colleagues have never met in person, far-flung staff can bond over footage. “It’s still very new, but super fun to see the birds that people are experiencing across the country,” Durda says.

Today much larger online communities for smart feeder photo sharing, streaming, and discussion exist on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and on manufacturers’ own apps. And a wide array of smart birding products are hitting the market, including birdbaths, nest boxes, and even binoculars. As more digitally connected gadgets spur natural wonder and foster camaraderie, conservationists also hope to realize additional benefits.  

For starters, these devices collect data that could prove useful to scientists. A bigger hope, says Durda, is that consumers initially enticed by flashy technology may feel compelled to take further steps to protect birds and their habitats—by cultivating native plants that provide natural food sources that wildlife needs to thrive, for instance. Her colleague Chad Witko, an avian biology specialist at Audubon, agrees that high-tech feeders could help prompt environmental and climate action. (In fact, that’s one of the goals of a recent partnership between the National Audubon Society and Bird Buddy, the smart feeder brand I sent to Nick.)  

“People will only conserve what they know and love,” Witko says. “Being able to connect using these feeders is a huge starting point.”

There’s nothing scientific about the video Nick sent me of his shrieking kids clustered at the window, but it’s premium data to me. “Get the food!” my five-year-old nephew yells at a pair of House Finches. “Get the fooooood!” Finding meaningful time in nature has never required technology, but tech does make vivid moments easier to document and share.

For a device that demands screen time, Nick and Emily’s feeder has, surprisingly, strengthened offline bonds. One sidewalk bird chat between Emily and the woman next door led to an impromptu kiddo playdate. And when Nick is at the office, that neighbor’s husband, a remote worker, watches from his window and texts my brother (a second set of) feeder updates. The dynamic reminds Emily of the pandemic, when she “ended up spending so much more time talking to our neighbors: a rare positive outcome.”

And then there was the Sunday that I called Nick and Emily for a cam report, and we spent a half hour just shooting the breeze. I can’t remember the last time we did anything like that without planning it first—maybe never. Emily and I joke about Nick’s obsession with House Finches—he imagines them going on dates to his feeder and then rating the experience on House Finch Yelp. We giggle over my niece’s blackbird migration theories. When I find a way to slip the pun “there’s something for everybirdy” into the conversation, they threaten to hang up.  

As we wind down our call, Emily mentions the “bird test”: a dating TikTok fad based on a concept from the Gottman Institute, a research group that studies human relationships. It prompts you to assess your partner’s devotion by pointing out a bird in the yard and seeing if they follow your gaze out the window. The health of your relationship, according to the test, depends on this shared curiosity, this mutual attention. It’s an attention that begins with a bird and then prompts us to tune in to each other. 

This story originally ran in the Summer 2025 issue as “Coming to You Live!” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.