Advice sought on buying a nature watch camera for my garden

Hi - Something has been attacking the plant life in my garden rooting up newly planted bulbs and the like and I would like to find out who the guilty party might be. Can anyone suggest a good/medium quality I/R nature camera which might be suitable for the job? Don't wish to spend silly money, something around £50 to £60 perhaps. All suggestions most welcomed

just had a look and amazon has a massive choice, but on other sites the price goes as low as £19.99.!!!

The culprit in my garden was,and still is, badgers. I am not sure how to deter them.

Male urine can keep the critters away in some cases

I used to pee into a bottle all day and chuck it around my garden at night

the damage they could inflict on my lawn was extensive, the first time it happened I thought some nutter vandal had taken a spade and hacked up the garden

They stayed away but I don't know if it was really me wee

Edited By Ady1 on 22/06/2022 15:46:42

I bought a cheap one from Amazon, around £30. I wanted to see whether a hedgehog was interested in the house we had provided. I imagine most have the same basic features. Motion detection, run time from the trigger activity and the time window for detection. Letting it run during daylight will catch birds and it’s surprising what cats pass through the garden at night. We did capture the hedgehog but he has not taken up residence, we knew a hedgehog was about as he had left his calling card on the lawn. A badger would need a fairly large access point I would think but cats and hedgehogs squeeze under my gate and use the hole in a chain link fence. Of course cats and squirrels are not constrained by fences. Squirrels can tear up grass if they are hunting for nuts. Wireless cameras are available but my cheapie just has a memory card which I have to collect from the camera and view on a computer, the card will usually be an extra on top of the camera cost.

Mike

Edited By Mike Poole on 22/06/2022 16:08:57

I use HIKVISION cameras a fair bit - camping lodge water-hole viewing, home perimeter watch, etc. The DS-2CD2012WD ( 4mm lens) is a small camera that works very well at night, self IR illumination up to around 30meters - 12V DC and a LAN cable to your PC with their software and you can view, record, etc. I am sure you have HIKVISION in the UK - around $60 on ebay. They also have WiFi cameras of similar ilk - need only supply +12v, if you have a WiFi router in your home for your internet, etc, then that is more convenient - there are around twice the price though...

There are wildlife cameras ( https://www.wildviewcameras.co.uk, etc - ) from a number of 'outdoor' shops, but those cams are generally above £100 ( plus!)

If you have a decent Security product supplier nearby I would pay them a visit. ( https://www.argos.co.uk / https://www.gardenersworld.com/, etc)

I've got a Ltl Acorn 5310. Works fine on hedgehogs (and cats) in the garden and pine martins and red squirrels at the cabin in Scotland we rented last week.

Rod

Hello Greensands,

We have a mains powered camera that will do what you want which is sensitive enough to see mice and oddly enough moths!

It is sold at the BT shop, model number C320WS, cost below £60. Attributes include Wi-Fi, range depends on your modem and it needs a micro SD card to save images on

Images are in full colour in daylight with excellent I/R night vision---the only drawback is that it needs mains power. Fitting is not difficult, a kit is provided and the necessary waterproofing

We are pleased with both ours. One watches for hedgehogs, the other operates as a door cam

Brian

Mike we had success with a hedgehog taking up residence in a hedgehog house that I built. The hedgehog came to us from our local vets, it had been injured and taken to the vets who patched her up and were looking for somewhere reasonably sheltered to release her. We released her in the garden and it was Autumn time so we kept leaving feed out for her every night by the house that I had built, the food disappeared every day so we assumed that she was still around. As the weather got colder we put out handfuls of hay by her food every night in front of the hedgehog house, each morning the food was gone and the hay had been dragged into the house, this carried on until midwinter when we stopped putting out hay as the house was full by then. Anyway the story resumes in the Spring and one day she was outside of the hedgehog house with 5 baby hoglets, almost as if she was showing them off to us. We didn’t have any cameras to record nocturnal activities but I am sure that we would have some amazing shots if we had. Dave W

What's this got to do with model engineering? No, I'm not a miserable old killjoy. It's one of the joys of this forum that wildly off-topic posts pop up quite often. They're usually fascinating, and the breadth of knowledge shown by contributors is amazing and humbling. Keep it up!

HERE HERE ! Noel

This is THE TEA ROOM. Off topic by definition!

I'm blaming foxes for digging in my front garden

Yes, foxes will do it. This blighter kept digging up my flowerpots. Don't know what could have made a tasty morsel in them though!

This is from the CCTV in the early hours.

John

The fox may be doing you a favour and eating slugs and snails though I would think it would not need digging to find this tasty delicacy.

Mike

I have a Campark T85 model. Mine has wifi and Bluetooth so that with an app on your phone you can see exactly where the camera is looking. Being battery powered means can move it around your garden to find entry and exit points.

Dennis - I have read that the battery loife on a number of models can be quite short. How do you find your camera compares in this respect?

Toguard H20 was recommended a couple of years ago by a club member as it only used 4 batteries and had run 3 months at the time on one set. It might be less range/ whatever though.

Foxes dig to get worms. Pots and compost heaps are easier to dig than hard earth. They don't eat slugs.

Greensands

One way of conserving battery life is to use the timer function so that the camera only becomes active during that period. Use of good quality batteries also helps. Mine uses 8 at a time so Duracell work out expensive but supermarket own brand are OK. Length of video recording is also something that will drain but 30 sec is long enough. IR light is another drain but most often you can set a delay between recording so you don't get 5 minutes of your cat chasing moths.

Badgers, can you still get Claymores?

Bear........