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I like to think my grandmother sends me birds.

She passed away a while ago, but I always think of her when I see cardinals. A few months ago, I found a deceased baby bird in my apartment complex. After a tearful flower burial, I asked my grandma whether she could send me a sign that the bird was wherever she was, happy and healthy. A few days later, another baby bird appeared, but this one was living and in need of a human to help her. I kept her warm and brought her to a wildlife rehabilitator, where she was able to recover.

Whether you believe that was my grandma’s doing or not, you can’t deny that birds are beautiful. They’re funny and interesting little creatures, and I always feel lucky when I get to see them. But they are flighty—literally—and not always easy to observe.

I’ve used bird feeders that stick on a window for easy viewing, but it’s harder to do that several stories up, and the wind gets too strong to dangle one from the balcony. Netvue’s Birdfy Feeder Cam is a sturdy feeder with a camera inserted inside for unobstructed views of feeding time. Once the birds find your feeder, suddenly everyone in the neighborhood knows it’s there. And if you look closely, you’ll see the same birds come back every day (I swear!).

Through Netvue’s app, I often sit and watch the live view. But you can watch recorded 10-second clips later. The Birdfy camera has 1080p resolution and the result is pretty nice, especially since the birds are up close and personal to the lens. The only place I could put the feeder faces the camera directly into the sun, and while I do believe that affects some of the species identification (more on that later), it still results in clear images of the birds for me to enjoy.

Importantly, it’s a solid feeder, holding 50 ounces of seeds, with a nice perch big enough for a few birds (if they don’t mind the crowding) and a roof to keep everything relatively dry. The hinged roof is made for easy refilling, too. Just slide it open to one side, fill up, and click the roof back in place.

The Birdfy is mountable with or without actually drilling anything—great for us renters. I used the included strap to attach it to my balcony railing, but the company shows it strapped to trees as well. I recommend adding the solar panel for the extra $25. It’s worth it to never have to charge a battery.

Netvue is a security company, so you can use the camera as an added security measure too, depending on where it’s located. There’s an alarm siren you can set off—it’s not a piercing sound thankfully, but I still strongly suggest not doing that when little birdy ears are nearby. The brand has responsive customer service too, and you can even live chat directly through the app.

The Birdfy isn’t all perfect, and where it’s lacking is a big one. If you opt for the $250 Birdfy, you get a lifetime of free AI identification. If you go with the Birdfy Lite for $200, you get video only, with the option to add AI later for $5 per month. A $50 charge for forever AI sounds great to me, but that identification has a long way to go.

I get mostly doves at my feeder, but there are a handful of other little ones that stop by too. Birdfy sometimes identifies a bird correctly in one shot, and then immediately calls it something else as it moves around. In the photos above, you can see it identified the same bird as a house finch and a pine siskin. These birds look really similar to each other, so I can understand the confusion there. But sometimes Netvue identified what is clearly a dove as a cardinal. The sun blaring directly into the camera might be to blame here, and as you can see it created a reddish blur that the AI may have been confused by. But still, this is the big and pricey marketing feature.

The company told me that “the variety and complexity of the natural environment and living environment make it difficult to accurately identify all birds,” but that Netvue is continuing to improve its algorithm by building up its AI database. You can report wrong identifications to the company, so I did that frequently, especially when it alerted me of a bluejay that was really just a car driving down the busy street the balcony overlooks.

I like that you can set motion alerts for just birds (or people, packages, and pets if you need to), but even when set to just birds, the camera tends to record all movement. So a day’s worth of notification might be 75 10-second clips of cars driving by. When viewing all the clips, you can filter them down to just birds, but I wish you could turn it off at the source. This could drain the battery or fill up your SD card.

As a bird lover, getting this kind of footage, flaws or not, is incredibly fun, and I think the Birdfy would make a great gift even without the AI. If you’d like to save some money and go for the non-AI version, bird identification apps like eBird or All About Birds are free. 

Netvue isn’t the only company trying to get into bird identification. We were excited to review the Bird Buddy at CES, which seems quite promising, but it’s been on preorder for months with no ship date in sight. Until the perfect bird identification software comes around, I’m happy watching my new friends through an app and through the window as they all congregate on the ledge, waiting for their turn for a nibble.