RECORD WILDLIFE IN YOUR GARDEN
Set up a hi-res nature cam
Are you curious to find out which animals use your garden as a play area at night? Want to keep an eye on nesting birds? A wildlife camera lets you do all this, but with lots of different models available, knowing which to buy isn’t easy. Here, we explain the different types, how you can reuse old memory cards with them and which settings you should tweak to achieve the best results.
1 Choose wired or portable
There are two main types of wildlife camera: wired models, which work like CCTV cameras and stream live footage directly to your TV or computer, and portable cameras, which run off batteries and record video when they detect movement.
The Wired Garden Camera from Wild View Cameras (£79 from www.snipca. com/39270 - pictured below) is one of the cheapest. It’s designed to be attached to a wall and comes with a 30-metre
cable that connects to your TV via a Scart adapter. If your TV has only HDMI inputs, you’ll need to buy a Scart-to-hdmi adapter (£17 from Maplin www.snipca. com/39271). Like most wildlife cameras, it has a night-vision mode (more on this later). However, you may have to sit up all night just to catch a glimpse of whatever’s traipsing through your garden, because the camera can’t record video – it only displays live streams.
If you’re more interested in birds, consider the RSPB’S Nest Box Camera (£149 from www.snipca.com/39272, see photo below left), which houses a tiny camera inside a wooden box so you can keep tabs on nesting birds. Like the Wired Garden Camera, it connects directly to your TV using a 30-metre cable. You can also buy a USB adapter (£29 from www.snipca.com/39273), which lets you connect the camera to your computer to watch live video and record it using the included software. If your budget allows, go for the IP version (£199 from www. snipca.com/39274). This has a similar design but uses an Ethernet cable to connect directly to your router, so you can access the camera’s live footage from any computer, phone or tablet.
If you want to capture video of occasional visitors to your garden and don’t want a cable trailing back to your house, we recommend buying a portable wildlife camera. These are battery powered, so you can place them anywhere in your garden (or even further afield), and have passive infrared (PIR)
sensors that trigger photo and video recordings when they detect movement. Our favourite - and the one we explore in more detail later - is the RSPB Nature Camera (£189 from www.
snipca.com/39275 – pictured below). Although you can’t use this camera to watch live video footage, it captures all recorded activity on an SD card, allowing you to review the night’s events each morning. The camera runs off eight AA batteries - in our tests, the low-battery warning appeared after 10 night-long recording sessions.
2 Check the specifications
Once you’ve decided which type of camera you want, take a moment to check the rest of its specifications.
Night vision
To capture the activity of your garden wildlife at night, your camera must have some built-in infrared LEDS (all the cameras mentioned earlier have these). The more LEDS a camera has, the clearer its night-time footage will be. The RSPB’S Nature Camera has 40 infrared LEDS, which managed to illuminate objects up to around three metres away in our tests. When positioning your camera, make sure there are no leaves blocking the LEDS, as this would reduce the camera’s ability to capture clear footage in the dark.
Image quality
A camera’s quoted resolution only tells you how big the photos and videos it produces will be - and bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. For example, a 14-megapixel photo will be smaller than a 36-megapixel photo, but it might look sharper and show more fine detail.
It all depends on the quality of the lens and sensor inside the camera. The only reliable way to judge a camera’s image quality is to look at sample images and videos from it. If the manufacturer of your chosen camera doesn’t provide samples on its website, contact the company directly to ask for some. We’ve uploaded some samples from our RSPB Nature Camera to our Dropbox account at www.snipca.com/39282.
Storage
Some wildlife cameras come with built-in storage for your recorded footage, but don’t worry if your preferred option doesn’t. Memory cards are now incredibly cheap - Sandisk’s 32GB SD card costs just £7 from Amazon ( www. snipca.com/39276). However, before you spend money on a new memory card, it’s worth checking whether you’ve got any cards from devices you no longer use, such as old cameras, phones and tablets. If you’ve got a spare microsd card and your wildlife camera takes SD cards, you’ll need an SD card adapter. These often come with microsd cards, but if you don’t already have one, you can pick one up for just a few pounds. This Sandisk adapter, for example, costs £3.50 from Amazon www.snipca.com/39277 (pictured left). Simply slot a microsd
card into the bottom of the adapter (pictured below left), then use it just like a normal SD card.
3 Set up and position your camera
The precise steps for setting up your camera will vary depending on the make and model, but we’re using the RSPB Nature Camera. Before you can access its settings, you need to insert an SD card. Open the camera’s case by unlocking the two metal clips on the right-hand side, then push the card into the slots on the underside of the chassis. The card only fits one way and will click into place.
Next, move the mode slider to Setup (middle position) and you’ll see a live view of the camera, allowing you to judge the field of view when placing it in your garden. Before you do anything else, we recommend turning off the ludicrously loud ‘beep’ that sounds whenever you press a button. To do this, leave the camera in Setup mode, press the Menu button, then use the down arrow to locate the Beep Sound setting and turn it to Off. As with all other settings, you need to press OK to save your choice.
When the Nature Camera detects movement, it can take a photo, record some video or both. To set this up, use the Camera Mode setting at the top of the screen (pictured). The settings below this let you adjust the resolution of photos and set how many shots the camera should take when the PIR sensor is triggered. You can also change the resolution and length of videos.
If you’re using a memory card with a relatively small capacity, it’s a good idea to reduce the video resolution. At the Nature Camera’s maximum resolution of 1920x1080, for example, a 1GB card would be able to store only nine oneminute videos. Reduce the resolution to 1280x720 (see photo 1 ) and the clip duration to 10 seconds 2 , and you’ll increase this to just over 100 videos.
You can also choose from three sensitivity levels for the PIR sensor. We found it best to leave this set to High, although on windy nights you may want to try a less sensitive setting, because branches blowing in the wind can trigger the PIR sensor, causing your memory card to fill up quickly.
To prolong its battery life, you can set the camera to operate only during the hours when activity is most likely. In the www.snipca.com/39279).
Once you’ve applied all the settings you want, move the mode slider to On (the top position), then close the camera’s case. On the Nature Camera, this involves securing two metal clips to create a waterproof seal.
4 Review and transfer your footage
If your camera has a screen, you can view your footage directly on the device. To do this on the Nature Camera, select Setup mode, press the Play button, then use the up and down buttons to cycle through clips. Press the Camera button to play a selected video.
Of course, a much better way to view your footage is to see it on a big screen.
The easiest way to transfer videos to your computer is to remove the SD card and insert it into the SD slot on your computer. If your computer doesn’t have an SD card slot, you’ll need a card reader such as Integral’s, which is £4 from Amazon ( www.snipca.com/39280).
With the SD card connected to your computer, open File Explorer (press the Windows key+e), select This PC from the menu on the left, then double-click your SD card. You can then drag the footage to a folder on your computer, double-clicking individual files to view them in your default media player. The RSPB Nature Camera saves videos in MOV format, which Windows’ default Photos app can play. If you have trouble opening the video files from your camera, try using VLC ( www.videolan.org), which supports all major video formats.
If you set your camera to capture photos as well as video, these will appear alongside the video files. The Nature camera saves photos as JPEG files. Text along the bottom of each image tells you the time and date it was taken, as well as the temperature – although we found that the temperatures recorded were much hotter than they were in reality.