Kiwibit Solar Smart Bird Feeder with Camera, 4K HDR Live Video, AI Bird ID

Why it's worth it

The Kiwibit shoots 4K video and 8MP stills through a 132-degree lens, so a goldfinch fills the frame with feather detail instead of pixels. Dual solar panels feed a 5200mAh battery, and the 1.5-liter dual hopper lets you run two seed blends at once.

The picture is the reason to buy this one. Most feeders in this category top out at 2K, and 2K is fine — until you try to tell a house finch from a purple finch by the wash of color on its back. The Kiwibit's 4K sensor and HDR give you that. The 132-degree lens is wide enough that a bird landing off-center still lands in frame, which matters more than the resolution number on days when the wind is up.

The dual-seed hopper is a small thing that changes what shows up. You can run sunflower on one side for cardinals and nyjer on the other for finches, and the 1.5-liter capacity means you're not out there every three days with a scoop. The hopper detaches for rinsing, which you'll be doing every week or two anyway. Audubon recommends cleaning feeders every one to two weeks to keep avian salmonella from spreading, so easy disassembly isn't a luxury.

From our review of 6 smart bird feeders with cameras, by David Sinclair, Managing Editor

What we like

• +The picture is the reason to buy this one
• +The dual-seed hopper is a small thing that changes what shows up
• +Kiwibit claims its AI covers more than 10,000 species, and the app builds auto-generated summaries and galleries around each…
• +You can keep your footage off the cloud entirely

What to know

• –The AI identification is the soft spot
• –4K video is hungry for bandwidth