The weather’s starting to turn colder and distinctly Autumnal now. We’ve got a crop of fungi flourishing on the lawn and raking and sweeping fallen leaves into piles as homes for hibernating wildlife is becoming a regular job.
With a weekend at home ahead of me, I decided to spend some time doing some wildlife focused jobs in the garden, and to put cameras out for as much of the weekend as possible to capture our garden visitors. For once my timing was spot on and I picked a great weekend to do this!
Bird Table Trail Camera
I recently bought some new trail cameras, as the original two became faulty and had to be returned. I chose the Browning Strike Force HD model from Wildview Cameras (https://www.wildviewcameras.co.uk). All of my recent Fieldmouse footage has been filmed using these, and I’m so pleased with the image quality. I’ve been eager to have an opportunity to try them out properly during the day, so with the addition of a +3 close up filter to allow focus at a distance of 33cm I set one up on the bird table and left it there for a few hours each morning.
Instead of video I tried out the photo mode – I set the camera to take 5 photos each time it sensed movement. I’m so pleased with the results, I can see I’ll be doing this a lot over the colder months.
Yesterday was a lovely bright day and the resulting image quality is just superb. Today conditions were a little more testing, being dull and quite dark for most of the day, but I’m still really pleased with the results.
Squirrel Feeder Pole
We’ve been plagued by the murderous cat again, and after one particularly horrible incident where he killed a baby squirrel, we were keen to put up a feeder that would allow squirrels to access it without crossing open ground. So I’ve put this one up by the hedge, which will allow them to get to it from hedging and trees rather than from the ground.
My Naturewatch Raspberry Pi Cam
Featured earlier this year on BBC Springwatch, My Naturewatch is software which allows you to build a basic wildlife camera using a Raspberry Pi. I’ve been keen to have a go, so ordered a kit containing all the necessary components from Pimoroni (available here).
The only other bits I had to add were a USB power bank and a plastic food box to form the outer casing. The kit was pretty easy to make and tool about an hour and a half – most of which was waiting for the software to download as our internet seemed to be on a go slow yesterday. But soon the kit was ready to go –
I actually ended up buying two kits, one contains a daylight camera and this one which contains a night vision one.
I put it inside the hedgehog feeder last night, as I hoped to get some closer up shots of our Fieldmouse. I need to do some work on positioning to find the best vantage point as there’s not much room inside the hedgehog feeder, but the results did not disappoint. I can see me having some fun with this little camera.
More about the My Naturewatch project and instructions for building the cameras can be found here – https://mynaturewatch.net.
Hedgehog Visitor
Of course the night that I fill the hedgehog feeder up with a camera box is the evening that the hedgehog returned! I saw one cross the road at the front of the house earlier this week so knew there was one around, but I couldn’t believe it when I checked the garden camera this morning and saw that one had been happily scurrying around the lawn for a good 3 hours last night.
As always, I have my fingers firmly crossed that this one sticks around! We think one hibernated here last Winter so it would be lovely if this one did likewise.
All in all, an incredible wildlife-filled weekend!
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