The Birdfy Feeder Rookie ($119.99 with a lifetime subscription or $109.99 with a solar panel) proves you don't have to choose between a smart bird feeder with an excellent camera and one at a low price. The Rookie costs less than half as much as the Birdfy Feeder 2 Pro ($319.99) or the Bird Buddy Pro ($299) and delivers the same joyful bird-watching experience as its pricier competition. Its Wi-Fi-connected camera records a video and takes pictures whenever a bird stops by, sends the footage to the cloud to identify the species, and then to an app on your phone so you can share clips with friends and family on social media, and start building a virtual bird book to keep track of backyard visitors. The Feeder Rookie works well, delivering sharp photos and smooth video for an unbeatable price, earning it our Editors' Choice award for affordable smart bird feeders.

Design: Small and Simple

The Rookie is one of the smaller, simpler smart feeders I've tried. The feeder has just three pieces—a molded plastic base with a 1.3L seed hopper and tray, a removable lid, and a Wi-Fi-connected camera. It's available in a beige-and-green finish—which I received for review—or blue. It's pretty small, about 8.3 by 6.4 by 8.1 inches (HWD) assembled, and weighs less than a pound empty.

The camera connects to Wi-Fi and works with the Birdfy smartphone app, a free download for Android or iOS. It records a short vertical 1080p clip and pulls out a few photos to accompany it. The app also identifies visiting birds (and critters like squirrels) by species, and lets you save photos and clips to an online collection and your smartphone's camera roll, and post your favorites to an in-app social feed.

As you'd expect from a device meant for outdoor use, the Rookie has an IP66 rating, which means it can withstand powerful blasts of water from any direction. I tested it in the late winter and early spring, and the feeder held up as expected; it worked fine even during spats of heavy rain and high wind.

(Credit: Jim Fisher)

I'll get into the nitty-gritty of Birdfy's pricing plans further down, but I think it's worth it to get the feeder with the lifetime subscription and buy a solar panel separately, since USB-C solar panels are readily available for less than $20 on Amazon. The species identification feature is compelling, and at $4.99 a month a la carte, it makes far more sense to get the Rookie with lifetime access and purchase a panel separately.

With a solar panel attached, I ran the Rookie for weeks without seeing the battery dip below 100%. Without a panel, I saw roughly a 10% drop in battery life per day, so you can expect about 10 days of power between charges. If you decide to skip solar, it's simple to bring the camera inside to charge, as it pops out of the feeder tray without tools.

(Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

Birdfy includes two ways to mount the Rookie in the box. It comes with a pair of hose clips for attaching it to a pole and a plastic hanging bracket. I mounted it to the side of my deck using the bracket and included screws. I'm not very skilled with tools, but I was able to make short work of the task with a power drill.

Birdfy App and Service: A Large Ecosystem With Multiple Pricing Tiers

Birdfy makes a lot of smart bird tech, and it's all managed from the Birdfy app (a free download for Android or iOS devices). This is good news for enthusiasts who may want to use multiple smart feeders, nesting boxes, and a bird bath, and monitor them all from one place. The app supports push notifications for new visitors (you can turn them off if you prefer) and lets you save your favorite clips to cloud storage or your phone's camera roll.

You'll need Wi-Fi coverage for the Rookie to work. It's only compatible with 2.4GHz networks, which is pretty common for wireless security cameras and smart home devices. I didn't have any problems getting the Rookie on my dual-band network, though I have run into compatibility issues with my Eero 6+ mesh system and some of the company's other hardware. If you have an Eero and run into problems, there's a simple fix: just set up a guest network for the feeders. If you don't know how, Birdfy has instructions on its troubleshooting page.

(Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

If everything goes smoothly, setting up the camera with the app is as simple as pie. Just tap the three-line menu icon in the top-left corner of the app screen, then the plus sign, and select Add Device. The app walks you through pairing and prompts you to take a photo of the QR code printed on the rear of the Rookie's camera.

I recommend buying the Rookie with a lifetime subscription as it lets you avoid paying a monthly fee to enjoy its species identification feature. Birdfy's species identification is excellent overall—it got nearly every bird that visited my feeder correct, and while it makes a mistake once in a while, that's the exception rather than the rule. I've had the feeder up and running for about three weeks and have seen a decently diverse flock of visitors, including blue jays, northern cardinals, house sparrows, house finches, and European starlings, to name a few.

(Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

During my review, I only saw one wildly wrong tag. In this instance, the Rookie said that a dark-eyed junco (a frequent visitor) was a Barbados bullfinch, which, as you'd guess by the name, is not native to my home state of Pennsylvania. I saw a few other near misses: One male house finch that visited right before sunset was tagged as a purple finch, and a female house finch was tagged as a similar-looking pine grosbeak.

Bad lighting and poor poses are the most likely causes of poor identification. If the app can't figure things out, it often just tags a bird as "Bird" and lets you add the species yourself, but a lot of these generic tags are just poor photos. The Birdfy misses most often when a bird is too close to the camera, poorly lit, or facing away from the camera. If you catch a misidentified bird, you can correct it, though you have to do so individually for each picture and video. I think it's only worth taking the time to fix mistakes if you're going to save the visit to your Collection or post to Birdfy's social channels, but it's really up to you.

You can wait for notifications to show up in the app, or pop into the camera at any time to view a live feed. From the camera view, you can access the camera settings to switch the frame rate or motion sensitivity. You can also grant others access to the feeder from this screen by sending an email invite, QR code, or link. Shared users see the same visit log and can view the live feed, but cannot change camera settings or delete videos.

(Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

The Birdfy app includes a Community page that shows photos and clips that other Birdfy owners have chosen to share, and lets you post your own. A My Birds page shows visits that you've favorited in your Collection, and a Birdfy Data page automatically populates with species that have visited your feeder. Finally, there's a Discover page with articles that'll teach you more about birds, and a Shop page where you can buy more stuff from Birdfy or upgrade your cloud storage.

Birdfy's pricing is pretty complicated. As mentioned, you can get the Rookie bundled with a lifetime subscription for species recognition, which is a good idea as it costs $4.99 a month or $49 annually otherwise. You can buy a lifetime subscription later on for $69.

(Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

The Rookie does not have a memory card slot for local storage, but it comes with online storage. It saves 30 days of video on a rolling basis, with a maximum clip length of 20 seconds. Upgrade plans include Basic ($1.99 month, $19.90 annual, 1 device) or Plus ($2.99 month, $29.90 annual, 2 devices), both of which up the maximum clip length to 30 seconds, as well as Pro ($5.99 month, $59.90 annual, 5 devices) and Premium ($8.99 month, $89.90 annual, 10 devices), both offering 30-second clips and 60 days of rolling storage.

The Collection page includes a separate 5GB storage bucket, available across all your Birdfy devices for free. If you want more, you can step up to the Basic ($1.99/month, $19.90/year, 20GB), Plus ($3.99/month, $39.90/year, 80GB), or Pro ($5.99/month, $59.90/year, 200GB) plan.

(Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

I like that Birdfy's subscription plans are, in large part, optional as long as you have the foresight to buy the feeder with a lifetime subscription. Some other feeders, like the Kiwibit Beako and Feathersnap Scout, make you pay a monthly fee for species identification and cloud storage. The Bird Buddy brand is the only one that offers both at no additional cost.

Video and Picture Quality: Close-Up Views of Songbirds

I'm impressed with the Rookie's video and image quality, especially given the price. The camera captures sharp 1080p30 video in a social-friendly vertical aspect ratio and uses a wide-angle lens positioned close to the perch to capture close-up views of chickadees, finches, juncos, cardinals, and other songbirds.

The perch is a little too small for bigger birds like mourning doves, and my voracious flock of starlings is often cut off. If you often get bigger birds in your yard, it's worth considering a feeder that sets the camera further back from the seed; the Birdfy 2 Pro and Bird Buddy Pro are the best I've tested, but both cost more than twice as much as the Rookie.

(Credi: Birdfy/PCMag)

You can also set the camera to a 1080p60 recording mode, which gets smoother video that you can slow down in your phone's photo playback app or basic video editing software. It's a shame that the Birdfy app doesn't let you view this video in slow motion without the extra step, but that's a minor complaint. Video quality and pictures are a little softer and show a narrower field of view at 60 fps, but that's a reasonable trade-off to get slow motion. You can switch between 30fps and 60fps via the app as often as you'd like.

Like most smart feeders, images look best on sunny days. In good light, colors are accurate and vibrant. I reviewed the feeder in the early spring, when male birds show especially bright plumage to attract a mate, and the colors of my visiting cardinals really pop. Video is a little drab on gray days, but it still looks good, and the camera captures smooth motion and excellent detail at 30fps. The footage is a little softer at 60fps, but it still beats other cheap bird feeders like the first-generation Birdfy, Birdkiss, and Feathersnap Scout.

(Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)