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I’d like to get my eldest lad (13) one of those trail wildlife cameras for his Christmas. He’s got a go-pro already, I think he’d use this in the garden to see what visits the pond (we get heron quite often) and generally around the garden.
Beyond that - no idea what features he’ll want or need?
There seem to be lots of cheap ones to choose from - I expect they’ll be bobbins? But then he’s not chris packham so a broadcast quality thing will be overkill
What’s the sweet spot price wise for these things? Specific recommendations appreciated
Interested in this too
A few years back my sisters got my dad one.
No idea which one it was. A generic green plastic housing. The results are pretty good. No different to the night time camera trap shots on springwatch.
He's seen some good behaviour with it.
I bought one from here:
Nature Spy
The buying guides were useful and the price seemed decent. I can't remember all of the features to look for, but I do like having the screen on the front so you can preview the angle when you're setting it up.
Apeman H55 here.
You need to keep an eye on the battery level (8x AA), particularly in cold weather
It'll sometimes film "nothing" where it's been activated but the creature is already out of shot. It's fine for a specific target like a pond or a known route but might struggle to take in a whole garden with a single camera
You need to check them daily or you'll build up a big back-catalogue that needs to be checked. Don't expect good darkness shots, but you'll be able to identify different animals
Apeman something or other from Amazon here and pretty much reflect timba's experience.
Mine was 30 quid and we've used it in the garden to spot badgers, foxes, lots of birds etc.
It claims to be full hd, and it may well be but it's also got heavy compression but as long as you don't have blue planet ambitions with it then it works perfectly fine for spotting and identifying garden activity.
Ours was about 30 quid around 4 years ago I guess. It has IR illumination (which works very well) and a proper PIR for movement detection. You can power it off a separate PSU of you want but I've never tried it.
Build your own from a raspberry pi if he's into that sort of thing. You can either buy the kit or parts separately and download the software:
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/my-naturewatch-standard-camera?variant=12445127671891
Instructions here:
https://mynaturewatch.net/
I've got a ceyomur cy95, bit pricier but the solar panel is very good, means you can leave it out in the woods for a week or so. It has an app so you can connect remotely to download footage and adjust your angle etc
We started out with a Ltl Acorn something or other which was fine, but after it got dropped out of a tree we have now upgraded to a Browning something or other else which has much better image quality (especially at night), faster trigger speed etc. To its credit the ltl Acorn has kept going with judicious use of cable ties, wire and a big elastic band.
I see that you can get wire loops and locks for them to stop them getting nicked if they are left out in the woods. Do they have a visible IR beam or something that makes them detectable?
We've got a Campark T45, cost less than £50 a few years ago. I wouldn't necessarily 'recommend' it but to give an idea of the cheap end of the market.
It's microphone has never worked properly (muffled). We should have had a go at taking it apart but just never got around to it.
Because it is at the cheaper end, it takes a second or so to start filming (trigger speed) which can miss very fast moving wildlife and it needs a break in between each 30 second clip (that's it's maximum). So you don't get to film long chunks of time, but segments.
Mentioned above, it needs fully charged AA batteries to operate, particularly at night (IR) and if cold it just won't work with less than 1.1V (and that is why it says not to use rechargables).
It is set off by small critters as well as bigger as long as they are within a few metres, mice and birds and so on.
Overall for a cheap thing to see what visits over a day and night and you'll check it each day, I think it's good quality and value. If you want remote controls or to leave it out for a week (check privacy and access!) then you'll need to pay more. Examples of the video quality here (badger) and here (foxes).
I bought the other half one years ago - cheapest I could find was around £40 at the time. Footage was good enough, worked well but absolutely ate through batteries. 6 or 8? Duracell every 36 hrs of run time.
"Do they have a visible IR beam or something"; ours has a small sensor light that flashes and has an audible but very quiet 'click' on when it is activated. So if leaving it in a public space on a track, yes it is probably noticeable because you have to set it up off the ground to get the camera angle right (i.e. on a tree trunk - ideally put a wedge at the top to angle it slightly down). In conservation work, you would tend to leave them for a long time but off-trail and the bigger problem is wildlife having a rub or deliberate go at them (especially outside of UK, e.g. bears in North America)
@slowol - this is going on my 'to build' list for the new year. Think I can get my 5yo involved with some bits too.
Like the idea of build your own with Raspberry Pi. Similarly a bit of hands-on, you can get "bat detector" kits that you have to assemble and solder. They only cover a specific range of frequencies in a range, so you don't know exactly what you are listening to (species) but you can hear bats and other high frequencies that birds etc make. assemble-and-solder bat detector
depends how much you want to spend - I'm into Pis, and the mrs likes bats, so I have looked into this in depth 😃 There is an Italian company who make industrial wide-spectrum ultrasonic mics, if I ever decide I can stomach the 200+EUR price tag I will get one! There's at least 2 decent Pi software projects I found to take the audio from the mic & automatically identify the bat species & count how many there are! And record/graph the data obvs 😃Similarly a bit of hands-on, you can get “bat detector” kits that you have to assemble and solder. They only cover a specific range of frequencies in a range
as for the OP camera recommendations, if it's just for your garden, no real reason you have to use a "wildlife" camera, IME these tend to be under-specced & over-priced! I really like the Tapo Cxxx cameras (and there'll probably be offers on BF), a mate used one to record his hedgehog house. Image quality & night vision are very good. I've got a little ones as bird-box camera in my chicken coop and plan on getting a couple more for wild-bird & bat boxes. Although you [I]can[/I] get a fairly expensive battery powered one, my mate just position his fairly close to his outdoor power socket and ran it off that (they're only 12v) alternative you could rig up a 12v rechargeable battery or even just run a cable (which is what I do for my chicken-coop camera). (Bonus of using a "normal" camera is you can re-purpose it for something else when they get bored of it!!)