CES 2025: New Bird Buddy Nature Camera Lets Your Plants Tell You What Day They’ve Had
Before particularly bad storms, I have been known to go outside and give my plants a boost. I’m not sure how I would feel about receiving messages of distress from my garden (“I need help!” from Bob’s fig tree, etc.). But you can bet I’ll be signing up for this parasocial experiment because today at CES Bird Buddy announced Petal, a new AI-powered camera that will help you interact with the outside world.
Petal is a solar-powered camera that can be mounted on a raised bed or pot, attached to a garden bed, or wrapped around a tree branch. It will work anywhere there is Wi-Fi and sunlight. Like the bird cameras that Bird Buddy is famous for, these cameras will provide you with extremely high-resolution, close-up videos and photographs of birds, insects, and the plants they perch on. The cameras will then use a layer of artificial intelligence that can identify what’s happening outside, from a flower blooming to birds hatching or a tomato ready to be picked.
As with most Bird Buddy cameras, you can do a lot without a subscription, but with a subscription you can name individual birds as well as the flowers, bugs and plants in your yard. I can’t decide if it’s adorable or crazy, but I’m 100% ready to ride this summer.
Bird Buddy hopes that you will purchase Petal in multiple quantities and place them in your yard. They’ll even have interchangeable lenses so you can use wide angle or change it to macro for greater depth of field. You can capture time-lapse footage and still receive notifications when your favorite artichoke plant is visited by a bee or insect, or when it is affected by the weather.
Despite what was announced today, Petal will be officially launched on Kickstarter this summer along with another Bird Buddy release, WonderBlocks, a modular plant system for outdoor growing that includes mason bee hotels, insect hotels and self-watering pots. Bird Buddy will also offer planting blocks infused with native plants and pollinators native to your region. All of these parts are designed to work together and seem to imply that Bird Buddy is moving away from a singular focus on birds and making bird watching part of your connection to the outside world. Pricing has not been announced for either the Petal or the WonderBlocks.