Technical

If you ever wanted to know how all our cameras and bird boxes are set up, this is the page to read! Below is lots of information about each bird box and the feeders we have in our garden.

Current Project

The main project at the moment is upgrading all the camera cabling and bird box camera housings. It is a big job that is being done in stages. The first stage is to upgrade the camera housing to Box 1 and the cabling to the box. The next stage will be the remaining boxes and cabling on the other side of the garden and the final stage will be the feeder cameras and cabling.

Each box will have at least one high quality camera inside and one outside. The main 3 boxes (Blue Tit, Robin and Single Sparrow) will also have the ability to attach a side camera looking through a hole in the wall of the box.

All the boxes will also be fitted with a microphone, white LED lighting for daytime viewing and infrared led lighting for night viewing.

The feeding area is also going to get new higher quality cameras. These will consist of cameras on the bird table, feeder tubes, mealworm feeder and the ground area below the table for all the ground feeding birds.

The aim is to get all this completed in the next month or so, to be ready for the 2010 nesting season. Once the new cabling is in place, we will be able to start streaming cameras to the website again.

 

 

Box 1

Bird Box 1 is a hole nester suitable for Blue Tit's. It has been occupied and used for 4 years. Last year, a Blue Tit family successfully raised a brood of 9 chicks. We hope for the same success this year!

There are 4 cameras placed on this bird box. Three of these cameras are situated in the removable camera housing that sits on top of the box in place of the lid. This contains an overhead camera, a camera facing the nest cup and an outside camera looking down on the hole. The fourth camera is a side mounted camera looking into the nest box.

Box 3

Bird Box 3 is a hole nester suitable for house sparrows. We have only had 1 brood from this box and some interest in other years. We hope we get another successful brood from this box, this time with the cameras watching!

Box 4

Bird Box 4 is a Sparrow terrace which consists of 3 sparrow boxes next to each other. As sparrows like their close communities, this box is ideal for them. We haven't had any nests in this box yet as it is relatively new but we have fingers crossed for this year.

Nest Perch

This nest perch is located high up on the same wall as the Blue Tit Box 1. It provides a safe and secure place for birds such as blackbirds to build their nests. In 2008 we had a successful brood of 3 chicks from a blackbird pair.

A colour day/night camera gives us good clear shots into the nest which is covered by the wall creeper at that time of year!

Feeders

Our bird table, on which we put a variety of seed mixes, nuts, fruit and suet treats, is fully equipped with 3 cameras.

 

Nature Watch Computer

The computer that we use for all the Nature Watch cameras is a self-built Dual Core computer with 4GB of RAM and 500GB of Hard Drive space. 4x 4 channel capture cards are used to record from the cameras in the garden. These can be set to motion record so we only record when something is actually happening.

The computer also has two 8 channel capture cards that allow us to stream all 16 cameras direct to the web for you to view at home!