8/23/2023 0 Comments Best rated cardinal bird feederI immediately thought about the acrobatic squirrel that my Bird Buddy had captured - not infrequently - dangling from the roof of the feeder by its hind legs while it gorged itself on bird seed. The new Bird Buddy smart bird feeder photographs and identifies birds - and the occasional squirrel - and sends notifications to a smartphone app That would act as a kind of secondary disturbance.” “Most feeders are for enhancing food for certain species, but you could be attracting a crow or something that could come in and gulp up everything. “But a bigger question is how is your feeder affecting the little ecosystem around your yard?” she said. However, Morrissey wasn’t about to totally let me off the hook. “In that case, you’d be at a pretty low level of disturbance,” she said. Morrissey said that actions like stomping around a bird’s natural habitat or using a laser pointer are examples at the more-disturbance end of the continuum, while the stealth remote capturing of the birds’ images (the Bird Buddy’s camera shutter is silent) skews toward the other. So there’s kind of a continuum of privacy from the least disturbance to the most disturbance.” “One of them is freedom from unwanted or undue intrusion, and another one is freedom from being observed or disturbed. “There are a couple different definitions of privacy,” Morrissey said as we talked through the topic. That’s how I ended up on the phone discussing the privacy rights of birds with the project’s founder, Marla Morrissey. So when I discovered the Mindful Birding project, whose stated goals include “encourag a practice of mindfulness among birders,” I decided to push my inquiry a little further. Still, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I was somehow being too intrusive. The Bird Buddy app has a built-in alert to remind me about regular feeder cleanings (and links to an instructional cleaning video), and the notion of using pre-recorded birdcalls - or live bait - hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’ve got a 33-pound bag of Petco All-Purpose Seed Mix for Most Wild Birds on hand at all times. The guide went on to explain that being responsible includes asking, “Could this be harmful to the bird?,” not luring birds using live or dead animal bait (a practice that changes predatory bird behavior), not using birdcall audio clips and keeping bird feeding stations clean, stocked with the right food and positioned with the birds’ safety in mind.īased on that, I felt I hadn’t run afoul of the Audubon Society. “Luring birds closer in order to photograph them is often possible,” notes the pertinent section of the guide, “but should be done in a responsible way.” The first stop on my hunt for answers was the National Audubon Society’s Guide to Ethical Bird Photography and Videography. In thinking through my bird-bullying behavior, I started to genuinely wonder: Did these visitors to my backyard have a right to privacy? And if they did, was I somehow violating it by using my high-tech toy - essentially facial recognition for the bird world - to identify and track them? And if I was violating their privacy, was I somehow making it worse by sharing and commenting on the photos and videos?
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