More squirrel nest building

Our squirrels are getting a bit carried away with adding shrubbery to their nest.  This one can't make its mind up what to do with them....

...that's if you can see through the cobwebs....

Ground-level wildlife webcam camera hack

Over the last week or so I've been attempting to photograph my local badgers using conventional means (DSLR + telephoto lens) - the main problem being: 1) badgers are active at dusk / night, so light levels are low, 2) they are very timid so don't let you get close.

This is the closest I managed to get 'in person':

Badger - can you spot her?

Wanting to get better pictures, I cobbled together an improvised ground level webcam to see if I could get a more 'up-close and personal' perspective:

Cobbled together 'Garden-cam'

This is an unused robin nesting box, with a TP-link POE adapter and a Raspberry Pi model B with Microsoft Lifecam Studio webcam.  All sourced cheaply from ebay. Connected via oudoor cat5 ethernet cable to a PC running iCatcher Console.  The video stream is setup as described  in this post.
I part set this up one evening last week, and left wires and components scattered about having popped in to eat - I left it on in the hope that something would wander past, and got this footage of one of my local badgers:

You can see her being a bit wary of the attached gear, but not to the point that she wont come and investigate.  Later that night I stuffed all the components into the robin box to tidy things up.  Since then,  we have got nice views of the local wildlife as the following screen grabs show:

Passing fox: 4:30 am

Red deer fawn

Squirrel

Jay with mohican

In most of my bird boxes I've used the Microsoft LifeCam.  I only recently acquired a LifeCam Studio ebay bargain - its much better in low light levels due to a bigger sensor size.  It cant see in the dark, but is good for low light levels

Squirrel nest box update for May 2014

We've had quite a lot of activity in our squirrel box this month, and a fair few 'awwww' moments...

Snuggled up with squirrel chums

I had hoped earlier in the season that extended periods of mating seen in April would have lead to lots of baby squirrels, but we're not there yet.  This box is located approx 80ft up a conifer tree at the bottom of my garden, which backs onto woods. There's no passing people traffic, so they get very little disturbance.

Squirrel box behind conifer tree 

The box was originally designed with owls in mind, but the squirrels chase everything else away - I don't mind much as its a slice of nature you don't normally get to see.  In 2013 we had a family of Great Tits nest raise a brood... I had to add a squirrel-baffle (= plank of wood with small hole over the entrance) to keep them out.

Great tit nest in the same box (2013)

Shelter from the rain:  I can usually predict if the squirrels are in residence by checking the weather. They usually move in when it rains, and this weekend was no exception.  Watching them go from soggy rats to fluffy squirrel is entertaining! The interesting thing is that they move in en-masse.  We had four sharing over most of this Saturday during a downpour.  I don't know such communal living is normal behaviour, but they spend their time playing, grooming and sleeping in a jumble.

How to tell squirrel from squirrel?
One squirrel looks very much like another - so its difficult to say if the same ones keep coming back.  We do have one with a notch out of its ear, but the others don't have any distinguishing features

Squirrel with ear notch

Boys or Girls? The camera is top down, and does not give the sort of angle that can readily tell boy from girl: See Great British Bake off Squirrel for what I mean - maybe something to add to my to do list?

Other (non-squirrel) species
This isnt an exhaustive list, but I thought it would be fun to list all the other bugs/birds that have found their way in.  We get quite a lot of wasps - its not beyond the realm of possibility that it would make a good wasp nesting site - I don't fancy having to do any camera mintenance if that were to be the case.
Other creatures seen include flies, bumblebees, spiders, woodlice and other birds (eg Coal tit & some miscellaneous feet in one of the pics below.. so I'm not sure what it is).  I also snuck squirrel feet in the mix too!

Non-squirrel species (+squirrel for good measure)

Camera: Information on camera setup can be found in this post

The next thing we're waiting for is baby squirrels.  I'm not sure how 4 squirrels will manage a litter though?

Squirrel montage collages

Just a quickie today,  My squirrels have been spending quite a lot of time in the owl squirrel box recently. They can usually be found in it when it rains and spend most nights in it at the moment.

I've been playing with the photo collage tool in Picassa, and have made these 'delightful' montages.  My wife thinks that one of them isn't suitable for my work desktop background, see if you can figure out which one it is.

Squirrel Montage 1

Squirrel Montage 2

I've linked to high res versions of these if you too want to offend your work colleagues.

Squirrels mating, Spring 2014

Now, I've been thinking of a tasteful way of putting this... but frankly have yet to find any option that does not degenerate into boyish giggling when passed around my family... so a quick update on the Owl Squirrel box.  All has been fairly quiet, except for an occasional peek.

However, this changed this morning with some frantic squirrel-on-squirrel action:

Yes I realise this is a little childish of me....

Had a particularly interesting moment when dealing with the observation from one of my (young) kids, that "Daddy, they really do like a long fight, don't they?".  From the short video clip below this is evidently true.

This is the first time they've been filmed as a pair, and I hope it bodes well for the possibility that we'll hear the pitter-patter of tiny squirrel feet.  According to Wikipedia (so it must be true, right?), gestation is approx 40 days, so expect squirrel babies mid May.  We're quite excited here!

Owl / Squirrel box update

Apparently the path to camera upgrades in nest boxes isn't really smooth.  When it works, it works really well.  It would appear that my squirrel pair are no longer in residence, however I did get a brief visitor earlier today which shows some strengths and weaknesses of this particular webcam

I need to deactivate the wobbly autofocus.  This can easily be done with the following command in  a linux terminal:

uvcdynctrl -v -d video0 --set='Focus, Auto' 0

I also seem to have run into a problem where it runs for approx 18 hrs then drops off the network.  Since at this point I cant SSH into it I cant tell if its still streaming and its a network problem, or whether the Pi has seized up.  I'm going to try reducing the resolution and fps and see if that makes it any more stable.  I have had this same webcam streaming in HD across my home network with a different Raspberry Pi solidly for several weeks, so I hope I haven't got a dodgy Pi one stuck up a tree now :(

Owl Box Camera Upgrade

So, as I mentioned in a previous post, my Tawny Owl nesting box has/had some squirrels in it who have done a loft conversion so we now have a squirrel drey - complete with branches sticking out of the entrance hole.

View from below

The camera in there was really limited in terms of the picture quality, as the a 2.4GHz radio transmission transmitter had very poor performance (read as mostly non-functional).  Today I took advantage of the lack of wind, and did  a quick and dirty mod, and replaced the existing camera with a webcam-raspberry pi combo.

I've been working for a while on a pi-cam nesting box for smaller birds (full post later), and Iused the same methodology to rig up a webcam in the Owl box.  For power, I've used power-over-ethernet (PoE), so I've only one cable running to it.

The box is approx 150ft from the house.  Last year, I ran exterior ethernet cable underground most of the way, to a shed which is approx 30ft from the tree.  From the shed I've run a ethernet cable which takes a power injection using a TPlinkPoE kit, which steps down from 48 to 5v in the nest box.  Webcam is a microsoft lifecam cinema.  I created all the network cables from a box stock of exterior cat5e network  cable.  There's no artificial lighting in the box as I had to make these changes 20ft up a tree so had no room for finesse, and plenty of room for falling out of the tree.  The old camera had several IR leds (too many),  so unfortunately night vision is out for now.

Kit in-situ (again no finesse here - mostly chucked in)

In a later post I'll detail how motion jpeg stream is setup from the Pi, but its cool to SSH into a linux box 250ft from my desk and 20ft up a tree.

  

The improvement in quality is immediately obvious.  I'll need to do some repositioning later in the week.

At 800x600 resolution I get approx 20 fps, and at 1280x720 I get 7-10 fps which isnt bad for full HD.  The video signal is a motion jpeg stream, which is fed to a pc running iCatcher console software.  This sees it as an IP camera and does the motion capture side of things. 

Audio: I haven't investigated this yet, but this webcam has an inbuilt microphone from which I think it should be possible to grab an audio feed.

Stay tuned for some (hopefully interesting) footage...

OwlBox or Squirrel Drey

So I've fiddled about with the wireless AV receiver for the OwlBox, and I now have a better idea of whats going on in that box.

I'll have to put the upgrade on hold for this box as a pair of squirrels have made it a home for the time being.

As you can see, the image quality isn't great.
The video is being sent approx 100m via one of these kits from Handycam

This is a 4 channel wireless 2.4 Ghz transmitter / receiver kit.

EzCap analogue to digital USB

This problem with this is that it is interfered with by cordless telephones, wireless routers and microwaves, and also neighbouring systems on the same frequencies.  I think the signal quality degradation is likely to due to this.

Plan B would be to wither use a high gain aerial, or maybe switch to an alternative frequency such as 5.8 Ghz used by professional CCTV applications example here, but this is also not cheap.

Some folk have also tried getting AV  analogue to digital capture devices (EzCap) working on the Raspberry Pi with mixed success, so I think I'll try that next.  See this discussion.  I think this is the best option as I already have network cable to the point of the transmitter for this camera and sending a digital video stream through this is preferable than sending it over the air.

Squirrels (?) in my Owl Box

In my last post I mentioned my owl box.  This was originally designed with Tawny Owls in mind.  Its situated approx 30ft up a conifer tree on the edge of woodland which contains many Tawny owls.  Easy I thought... make the habitat, and they'll move in.  Wrong!

Last year a family of Great Tits moved in and I had to add a cover to the Owl-sized entrance hole so that only my great tits could get in.  We had a competing squirrel who I thought would put off the Great Tits somewhat.  Once these chick fledged, I converted it back to the larger entrance hole, and promptly forgot about it as work stuff too priority.

This was my first camera-equipped nest box and it has a roof-mounted ccd-type analogue camera.  The box is approx 1x1x1 ft in dimensions.  Camera image quality started off good, but has gradually deteriorated.  I'm not sure what went wrong, whether its a combination of the 30ft AV cable run, or the subsequent 150ft wireless transmission over a crowded 2.4Hz frequency, or a dodgy camera, but because of this I have not checked it for several months - plus the PC with the motion capture software suffered a hard drive failure which I have only just got around to fixing.

I turned it all back on this afternoon expecting to get a blue screen, but there is some vestige of signal... and I have a new occupant!  All I can see through the white noise is a fair few small leafy twigs, with "something" moving about   Does not look very much like a small bird nest.

At this stage its not at all clear, but I suspect I may have bad case of squirrel.  I suppose they need somewhere to nest too, so I wont begrudge them their squatters rights.

If I can clear up the video a bit I'll post some if its good enough.

Not a nest of a small bird....