Wildlife Cameras

Have you ever wondered what visits your garden at night and during the day when you are not there?

There’s a fairly easy way to investigate; a cheap wildlife camera.  You see the more expensive versions used in nature programmes to capture an elusive snow leopard, however, a budget version can be used to spy on less elusive wildlife, albeit most likely the neighbours’ cats and a lot of pigeons.

Hello!

I’ve bought a few wildlife cameras over the years and the quality has improved greatly recently. Early (cheap) cameras were unreliable and tended to eat batteries.  They also were fussy, some demanding high-power, non-rechargeable batteries.  You also had to extract the memory card from them to view the pictures taken.

However, there have been recent improvements.  My latest camera, which cost under £80, runs off of a small integrated solar panel and has Bluetooth connectivity so I can beam the photos taken to my phone, which is easier than extracting a memory card.

The cameras can be useful to find out what has been causing damage in your garden.  For example, I found that we have occasional deer visiting, which explained some of the damage to my fruit trees.

Other regular visitors are  foxes, which come right up to the house and, to my surprise, also visit in daylight hours.

I set up a camera to monitor a bird feeder, which is a good way of finding our which birds regularly visit.   The only problem is that you will end up with a lot of photos to sort through as the camera goes off every time a bird visits the feeder!

It also captured a slightly bigger and less feathered visitor.

Here are a few notes of caution.  Firstly, make sure you position the cameras so they only spy only on your own garden.  Secondly, you might not always welcome the wildlife the camera captures.  Rats and mice are frequent visitors, as well as about a million cats!