My short, strange romance with a robot bird feeder
It names every visitor, sends a push notification for each one, and slowly turned my morning coffee into a nature documentary.
I did not expect to become emotionally attached to a feeder. But by day four I was refreshing an app to see whether "Chickadee #3" had returned.
How it works
A camera in the roof watches the perch, a small model guesses the species, and your phone gets a photo. That is the whole product, and it is delightful.
Where it goes wrong
The squirrels learned faster than the software. By week two the feeder was sending me twelve "unknown bird" alerts a day, every one of them a squirrel.
The model was confident, consistent and wrong in exactly the way only a model can be.
Still, I kept it. Some mornings a goldfinch lands, the photo is perfect, and the whole category of gadget briefly justifies itself.