“One way to measure the health of our climate and the ecosystem we live in is by measuring the size and variety of its fauna or animal population. Every winter, since 1987, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology conducts a massive citizen science effort called Project FeederWatch: Project FeederWatch is a winter-long survey of birds that visit feeders at backyards, nature centers, community areas, and other locales in North America FeederWatch data show which bird species visit feeders at thousands of locations across the continent every winter. The data also indicate how many individuals of each species are seen. This information can be used to measure changes in the winter ranges and abundances of bird species over time. This is our first year participating and we wanted to combine our interest in making and hacking, with our interest in nature and our participation in Project FeederWatch. So we decided to reinvent our future of bird watching and environmental monitoring with the Arduino 101! The Arduino 101 is ideal for this project because it combines the simplicity of the Arduino IDE to make our embedded programming easy, onboard capabilities such as Bluetooth LE with a wealth of sensors and breakout boards readily available. By embedding an Arduino 101 in a homemade bird feeder, we developed an experimental platform to measure weather parameters and monitor bird activity at our feeder. Adding in some exciting IoT technologies from Cloudinary and PubNub helped us to reinvent the future of environmental and ecosystem health monitoring!”