I SOOO need to get one of those. Is that one of the infrared ones or does it have a flash?
Yikes--I almost deleted this comment by accident--slippage of the finger!
This one has an infrared flash. So on the video clips, the animals are completely ignoring it.
I'd love to have several, set up at different places on the land. We have a two-board footbridge that animals use even when the creek is dry, the two artificial water sources, some game trails...
I suppose the sensible thing would be to have one camera and rotate it from place to place every day...or every other day. It would just be really cool to have a complete night census of multiple sites.
It would also be nice to win the lottery .
I hear that!
Well, maybe some more Paksennarion-related books would bring in some cash?
*nudge, nudge...* ;)
As a matter of fact, I'm 70K words into a Paksenarrion-related book right now...
That picture is so cool! Have you solved the time delay problem?
Maybe you just need to get some more friends who have trail cams they can lend you. :-)
You should see the video clip of the two raccoons following each other around the ledge.
The time delay thing appears to be built-in...that's just how it works with the camera they've used. From a past source, when I was first looking up this kind of thing, someone pointed out that DSLRs are faster to shoot than the point-and-shoot digitals because they expend battery power to be "on alert" and ready. Someone (I wish I could remember where that site was) had rigged up a fatter power supply and put his DSLR in a trail-cam housing. A one-second delay (which this one has) is considered a short delay for a game-cam, though regular security cameras, which run on line power, are "fast-on" too. Since running line power out to the waterholes isn't an option, I'm considering the solar-panel-to-12-v battery possibility, but that would still take another type of camera, probably. And I don't really have the time (or the skills) to build my own custom camera outfit right now.
The lily pond is an ideal situation because the combination of water, bait (frogs) and edging encourages animals to move in an area where the camera will pick them up, and stay there more than a second. I'm thinking how to position game-cams at the other sites to take advantage of their specific approach lanes, etc. It's going to take some tweaking to work within the limitations of a commercial turnkey system, but it's better than me missing deadlines to try to do it all myself.
It would be interesting to have one of those done on the railway cutting behind where we live on the edge of London - there's a lot of wildlife using it as a green corridor in and out of the city.
We have at least one family of foxes living around here (and some years the vixen has here breeding den on the far side of the cutting, so we get to see the cubs fro our roof), as well as many smaller mammals and quite a large bird population (even if some like the every-growing population of parakeets aren't indigenous).
Could you mount a game-cam on your roof, looking down into the cutting? (The infrared flash goes out about 45-50 feet on this model.) Though if you have trains running through there you might "flash" a lot of trains and scare officialdom. Is it an old cutting or one in use?
Sadly I think it'll be a little far for that - the cutting is of the order of 100 feet away. And it's in use - it's the main Waterloo to Reading line!
What's interesting about it, is as a line it links the green belt out past Heathrow with the various royal parks around Richmond and then Barnes and Putney Commons (which themselves join a large run of green that goes south to Wimbledon Common and then on to the Downs south of London. It's a fascinating confluence of the urban and the country.
Plus we have the added bonus of rapidly growing populations of non-native birds and plants...
I wouldn't consider growing populations of non-native birds and plants a bonus...but then my interest is in native wildlife, and I saw the damage done in New Zealand by non-natives.
However, if you've got no way to control them, you might as well enjoy them, I guess.
That was of course a sarcastic "bonus". Hard to get that across when you're online!
What interests me the most is the return of traditional species to the city - so we're getting wood pigeons, jays and woodpeckers in the tree in our garden.
The parrots are extremely annoying - especially their habit of screeching at 4.30 am.
Sorry...you're right, I missed the sarcasm thing. Some people actually do think non-natives are a bonus--that's why they bring them in (we SO love the "English" sparrow...! And those blasted starlings!)
But anyway...glad you're getting natives back to the city too. Another UK correspondent reported (not here, I don't think) that the authorities gutted a park near her flat of all its bird habitat because bushes attracted druggies, they said. No more bushes with berries, no more cover for low-nesting birds. Glad to know that's not a universal attitude.
Parrots screeching are a pain anytime...before dawn would certainly be bad. Though I was once awakened by a seagull in Scotland--it perched on the chimney of the house where I was staying and screeched loudly down the chimney, also before dawn. Since there was a fireplace in my bedroom...it was a very effective alarm.
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