What’s better than one camera on a bird feeder? How about two? What’s better than two cameras on a bird feeder? A 360 lens setup that will offer the full panorama of your local avian’s antics. Birdfy, one of the main competitors to the Birdbuddy series of smart bird feeders, showcased its new Birdfy Feeder Vista, which promises that no feathered friend will escape your sight.
The feeder sports a cylindrical shape with two lenses on either side of the top platform. Already, it’s a pretty intricate design considering it promises to shoot a 6K video at 30 fps through its two fisheye lenses. You want a higher resolution for 360 video considering the number of pixels needed to offer a clear picture of a global image (most 360 cameras like the GoPro Max 2 from this year support up to 8K footage at 30 fps). These kinds of 360 cameras take the two images filmed simultaneously and stitch them together, creating one contiguous video whichever direction you look. The camera also supports 2K resolution at 120 fps for slo-mo shots, though there’s no guarantee the footage at that resolution will show each wing flap clearly.
However, the real innovation may be in how the device offers the winged creatures their enticing morsels. Instead of a traditional gravity-fed feeding trough, the Vista uses an air pump to push the seeds and berries up to a feeding tray. This is meant to ensure the birds will be positioned at the right elevation for the 360 camera to pick up on. More importantly, the air pump can be manually controlled via the Birdfy app. Users can set how much feed goes up at once. This feature could potentially help you keep the squirrels away during the off-season. Or else, if the birds tend to go number two on your car’s windshield, you could punish them by limiting their dinner.
Birdfy promises the container keeps a tight seal to minimize any possible contamination of your feathered friends’ food. If true, then you shouldn’t have to go out as much to clean the hopper or replace the food. Whether or not you’ll have to charge more often is another story considering the device comes with a single battery pack and no solar option out of the box. The Vista is meant to be mostly hands-off, with cameras that kick in with weight sensors on the feeding rack.
The main reason you get a smart bird feeder is for the bird recognition and bird facts that come along with it. Birdfy says its “OrniSense” software is using AI—specifically a large-language model—to tell users which species are which. Whether it will get it right more than BirdBuddy’s current machine learning models is something to be determined.
To better compete against Birdbuddy’s device for fluttering sugar fiends, Birdfy is also crafting a hummingbird-focused feeder called the Hum Bloom. The hourglass-shaped device uses a hydraulic system to push nectar through its feeding bottle. However, the device’s camera is limited to 4K at 20 fps and 1MP at 120 fps, which may be far too limited to capture hummingbirds’ fast flight or their aerial jousting matches. The device includes a nectar capacity of 8.5 fl oz with small water bottle-like refills. The Birdfy app is supposed to tell you when your feeder’s sensors indicate it’s running low.
It seems like every square-framed camera is seeing new competition from all-around lenses. In 2025, Insta360—the company behind the X5 and X4 Air 360 cameras—brought out the Antigravity A1 drone that swapped a single, gimbal-mounted lens for twin fisheye lenses. That device let you look around a full 360 degrees while you hovered in the air. The experience on the Birdfy Feeder Vista may be similar, though we won’t get to try it out until January during CES 2026.
Read the full article here
