The Kiwibit Beako 4K Smart Bird Feeder With Solar Roof is a bird feeder that captures video of visiting birds in 4K quality and automates the process of building a bird book. It's easy to set up, refill, and recharge, and has microSD local storage support. However, its species recognition is often wrong, and the still images it pulls to fill the bird book don't look great. While the Beako offers higher video quality than many smart feeders, it's a step behind the Bird Buddy Smart Feeder Pro, which captures even better pictures and video and works without a subscription fee. The feeder is powered by a removable, rechargeable battery that pops out of the bottom of the feeder so you can top it off via USB-C. It takes around 6 hours to fully charge the Beako battery. Kiwibit doesn't sell replacement batteries at this time, which seems like a missed opportunity. The Beako works without a subscription, but only saves the past 24 hours of video on the cloud, limits videos to a maximum 20 seconds, and doesn't tag birds by species. If you don't mind using a microSD card, it's an economical option, though going through all the videos manually takes some time. Adding a subscription is a good idea if you prefer cloud storage to microSD. The Kiwibit app is broken up into four main pages: Home, Birds, Activity, and Account. The Birds page is a record of every species that's visited your feeder, and the Activity tab shows a list of every visitor in a daily calendar view. The Beako gets the species right more often than not, which I can't say about budget-priced feeders like the Birdkiss Smart Bird Feeder or the Detiko Bamboo Feeder. The feeder records 16:9 widescreen video at 4K (3,840 by 2,560) resolution, better than the soft 1080p you get with budget-line feeders like the Birdkiss or the first-generation Birdfy camera. Colors look good, the microphone picks up chirps and bird songs with excellent clarity, and while the framerate is locked at 15fps, the footage isn't choppy. The camera switches to a monochrome night vision mode if a bird happens to stop by before or after sunset. The lack of good stills is one of the reasons I'm rating the Beako a little bit lower than the Birdfy 2 or Bird Buddy Pro.
