Best wildlife camera?
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Hi
We are in the process of turning our large back garden into a wildlife zone. We already have ground and tree feeders for the birds and cat biscuits out for the hedgehogs and our efforts finally paid off – we had seen hedgehog poo but not the providers of it! – until Sunday when we caught our first sighting of a lady hedgehog!
As our garden is difficult to see into from the house except from the kitchen window which is very high up, i realised the other day that we are missing out as we spend nearly all our time facing the front of the house. We are planning to remove half of the lawn with wildflower turf this year and hope to attract more creatures. It suddenly came to me to install wildlife cameras out the back. This fired my husbands imagination and he has been looking online. I wonder if anyone had any recommendations?Putting cameras around the garden can be really rewarding. I have a number of cameras in my garden which produce fascinating footage of my nocturnal visitors. To share the footage with my family I set up a youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXN4CWPm5H-49ZUWgObuflw/ — feel free to look around. Asking which camera is best is like asking which type of car is best — so much depends on what you want to do with it. I’ve added videos on camera types and on things to think about when buying a camera. Be aware that the cheaper cameras are very vulnerable to moisture damage and so have to be treated with care. For example, the model I use most, the Campark T20, has a very effective seal around the case but when you open the camera up to get to the memory card or to change batteries you open up the seal. This means if you handle the memory card with damp fingers the moisture on the card will get sealed into the camera when you close it and can then affect the electronics. The more expensive cameras are more moisture proof.
I’ve an Apeman camera. It was £56 from Amazon.
I also bought an adapter.
It’ll take 13 second videos and one or two photos when activated.
It comes with a multi-positional bracket and a long strap.
I made a second bracket out of an old strap hinge so I can position it at either of two locations without having to use the strap. It’s pretty foolproof and the seal is very good. No worries about damp getting in, the two clips press the front down on the seal. I’ve opened it and taken the card out every day to download it on my laptop now for three months. Just have to remember to initialise the card when replacing it. I’ve set mine to turn on at 9.00pm and go off at 5.00am.
I can’t see the point in spending a lot of money on a trail camera just to take photos of hedgehogs. Best to position them around three or four feet from the ground to get some good shots., either in infra-red or as sometimes we do when it activates a PIR security light.He’s about 6ft away here.
This is our ‘arry,
“He wants to run away and join the hedgehog circus and be a high wire performer.”
Here’s one where he activated the security light on the back of the shed,
We previously had a decent one but it died so we have bought what is said to be a top of the range camera by the various guides out there. A Browning Trail Camera bought from Naturespy who’s profits go into wildlife projects. They provided a little mini-guide on where to start with settings and recommended using pro Lithium batteries. Very good so far, both on pics and video, day and night. Recorded even a rat, on the lawn going to our pond. Squirels playing, lots of cats, hedgehog, foxes every night, various birds in the early morning. We have some amazing video of life at night in the garden. In the wet/damp all the slugs, snails and worms come out to feed on the food we put down for the foxes and hogs. They obviously do not trigger the PIR but when the hog does we get an amazing coverage of all the creatures out together.
I tried to put a pic in here but seems to be beyond my level of IT skills.
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