Thursday 17 April 2014

Trail Camera / Scouting camera

Last Christmas my lovely wife gave me one of these:

KeepGuard KG-680V, 8MP Trailcam

For the last few weeks, I've had it set up at the bottom of my garden, which backs onto woodland.  Before this point, in the garden, we've had occasional fleeting glimpses of foxes and a badger once.  When I forget to close the gate, we often get deer into the garden that like to eat all the flowers.

The aim was to see if we could get footage of any of these with the trail cam...

I set it up overlooking a clear 'passageway' through an overgrown patch of land:



It has two settings: image or video capture (not both).  I've set it onto its highest resolution settings, which produces some nice images and the video is okay too.  It has built in IR illuminators which should illuminate up to 15m from the camera.  I'm using a high capacity SD card so can afford to leave it running for a long time

To begin with I thought this could double as a way to document the local cat population, 3 regular cat visitors cats so far..

Anyway, the wild animals caught so far:

1) Deer: We seem to have two regular visitors, we've called these two "Itchy" & "Scratchy" as they spend a lot of time doing just that.  There's a lot of ticks in the woods, so I wouldn't be surprised it they're covered in the things...


2) Fox: This is pretty cool - I'm keeping an eye out for more of him/her ?


3) Badger: Our favourite yet.  Unfortunately my only sighting is him/her? walking away - we're hoping to get better views over the next few weeks.


All in all, I'm really pleased with the results.  Not quite the 'Big 5' but there's time for a Lion yet...

The main limitation as far as I can see with my trail cam is that I need 2x SD cards so I can swop cards when reviewing footage.

Pi Trailcam
I felt quite inspired by this Raspberry Pi trailcam variant on this blog, which I might at some point consider emulating.  I particularly like the sparrowhawk.



2 comments:

  1. You seem to live alongside a busy animal highway...if there is a lion out there, I'm sure you are gonna trap him!

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  2. The badger is interesting as we only see him/her going in the same direction. The simple thing would be to mount the camera on the other side of the tree... Maybe then I'll get em elusive 'head-on' angle

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