To set up the Birdfy camera, you’ll need to grab the Birdfy app (available for Android and iOS). To get started, download the app, create an account, and follow the on-screen instructions to connect your camera. The app first prompts you to look for and scan a QR code printed on the back of the camera, and then to use the Birdfy camera itself to take a picture of a QR code displayed on your phone’s screen.

The app lets you pop in for a live camera view; Pro camera owners will see both lenses at once (Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

The Birdfy cam has a built-in speaker that lets you know how it’s doing. It’ll say things like “connecting to network” and “obtaining IP address” out loud to let you know it’s working. The camera also updates its firmware to the newest version during setup. Both cameras are restricted to the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi spectrum, so make sure to connect them to the right part of your Wi-Fi network if you run different SSIDs for 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels.

When things work, the setup is a breeze. I had the Birdfy 2 Pro camera up and running in minutes. However, my first standard Birdfy 2 cam encountered a hiccup during its firmware update, and I couldn’t get it to work no matter what. Birdfy sent a replacement camera for review, and I set it up without a problem. Both cameras stayed connected to my network without noticeable dropouts during two months of testing. I did have one instance where I had to manually reset both following a short internet service outage, but that was the only dropout of note during testing.

The Birdfy app includes an overview of your feeders, a bird book to save favorite clips, community features, and more (Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

Once you’ve set up your feeder, you can explore the Birdfy app. The app has five main pages: Home, My Birds, Community, Discover, and Store. It also has a hamburger menu showing all of your connected feeders (My Devices). You can set it to send push notifications to your phone’s screen when a bird visits.

I left notifications on during testing and was typically flooded with them, so you may want to turn them off. On the other hand, the feeder also notifies you when a squirrel stops by, and prompts you to sound its built-in siren and flash light to scare the cute little rodents away from their potentially stolen meal. My backyard squirrels are only occasionally annoyed by the siren, and don’t seem to be bothered at all by the cayenne pepper I add to my seed mix, so I’ve just decided to feed them too.

Home shows all of your connected feeder cameras in one place. Click into any of them to either see a live view from the camera (with recording controls) or a calendar view of daily visit reports. Buttons at the top show recorded species, so it’s easy to find your favorite birds or to find new ones to add to the My Birds page, which serves as a virtual bird book, sorted by species. My Birds saves pictures forever, not just for thirty days like the rolling calendar view.

The Pro camera’s Portrait lens caught this picture of one of my favorite regulars, a red-bellied woodpecker (Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

Community lets you peek in on clips that other Birdfy owners have opted to share. Whenever you save a visit to your My Birds page, the app asks you if you’d like to share the video with the community, so it’s entirely opt-in. If you’d like to learn more about birds, tap over to the Discover page, which includes educational articles on birds mixed in with news about new Birdfy releases and events. Finally, the Store page is just what you’d expect—it takes you to Birdfy’s online storefront.

Groundhogs caught on Birdfy cam (Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

Species identification is something you have to pay for, either as part of your purchase or later as an add-on, so you’re probably wondering just how accurate it is. During my two months of testing, the Birdfy correctly tagged all kinds of birds, including blue jays, chipping sparrows, house sparrows, northern cardinals, red-bellied woodpeckers, gray catbirds, downy woodpeckers, common starlings, brown headed cowbirds, and other suburban species. If you opt to take the camera off the feeder and try for other critters, you may have to give it some help; it wasn’t able to identify juvenile groundhogs on its own, for instance, and typically guessed they were squirrels. I won’t fault Birdfy on this, after all, it isn’t a Marmotfy camera, and young groundhogs look different than adults.

The Birdfy app usually gets species right, but can be wildly wrong if it tries to make a guess based on a partial image or poor pose (Credit: Birdfy/PCMag)

The Birdfy usually gets them right, with an emphasis on usually. When it misses, it’s typically because it caught a bird in a poor pose, only partially in frame, or with some motion blur from a slower shutter speed if the light is dim. These are the same problems I saw with Bird Buddy’s species recognition; both brands get it right more than wrong.

Understand that the Birdfy platform is completely cloud-based, and local storage is not an option with the Birdfy 2 or Birdfy 2 Pro camera. Because of this, you’ll want to make sure you have a healthy home internet plan, plus a Wi-Fi system that covers enough of the exterior of your home for the feeder to get a good signal. I use an Eero 6+ mesh system for my feeders, and I get good connectivity at around 100 feet from my house. On a typical day, the Birdfy 2 Pro camera uses about 2GB of upstream bandwidth and only a few hundred megabytes downstream.