Two Hogs Sharing Our Hedgehog Box

I'd suspected something funny was going on.

 

We knew we had two hedgehogs of similar size visiting the feeder.

 

But the camera monitoring the hog box entrance confirmed my suspicions.

A Hedgehog in our Hog House

 A hedgehog started to use our 'hog house' a few weeks ago.

So I put my PiCam at the entrance to monitor its comings and goings.

Chicks at play: RaspiCam 90fps

Our blue tit chicks came out of hiding a few days after leaving the nest, and now they are regular visitors at our feeders.

They need to learn the snatch-and-run technique, rather than spending too much time out in the open where they are vulnerable to predators.

Using a RaspiCam to capture video at 90fps results in slow-motion video and gives a better idea of their behaviour.

Robins, Newts & a Rapidly Changing Landscape

We are so fortunate to be able to enjoy a garden with such a variety of wildlife.

But with the current surge in local house building, more people and busier roads, I wonder what it will be like in years to come.

What will future generations find crawling around their back yard?

PiCam: replacing the RaspiCam lens

I wanted to get a closer view of the robins nesting in my garden shed.

So I decided to replace the standard RaspiCam lens on my PiCam with an M12 threaded lens.

This is the third time I've carried out this modification, and I still have a 100% success rating!

Robin nest 2015

During May we discovered that our resident pair of robins had nested in a blue plastic container inside our shed.

Once they had left, I put an old open fronted nest box on a shelf inside the shed, in the hope that they might return.

They did, and after a couple of weeks sitting on the eggs, we noticed a few days ago that the female was disposing of egg shell and starting to bring small morsels of food for the emerging chicks.

Some thoughts on Wifi coverage

As our resident robins have built a second nest in our shed, I've been doing what I can to improve the wifi link between wifi router and PiCam.

 

My efforts may also be useful for next season (BirdBox 2016), as I plan to install two boxes further down the garden than in previous years.

It is tempting to assume that a powerful router/wifi node will solve all your problems, but I don't think that is the case.

Bird Feeder Etiquette

I use to think that there was a definite pecking order around our bird feeders, with smaller birds always giving way to larger species.

But closer observation over recent years leads me to believe that the situation is far more complicated.

And by slowing down the video captured by my RaspberryPi camera system, I can observe detail that I would have missed if just watching from my kitchen window.

Portable PiCam: more video

With lots of activity at our bird feeders, it seemed like a nice sunny day to play with my portable PiCam.

Now we are into June, many of our garden birds are bringing their young to the apple tree that supports our collection of hanging bird feeders.

This invariably leads to a certain amount of conflict between different species, and also between grumpy members of the same group.

My Portable Pi-Cam

Well, when I say "portable" I wouldn't want to lug it around London on a site-seeing trip.

Maybe transportable is a better description. At least I can move it around the garden and film the wildlife.

This post provides more technical detail on this system, and a few more video clips.

BirdBoxPiCam2014: inside & outside

I put together a portable RaspberryPi camera system a few days ago, so here are a few video clips outside the box.

Inside the box things are not looking great.

I don't think the female has been feeding the chicks at a high enough rate, and it looks like we may have lost a few more chicks.

BirdBoxPiCam2014: Streaming video at 30fps

Now that the female has moved on from egg-laying-mode to incubation-mode, I've switched off motion detection in favour of live streaming.

It was more of a struggle than I'd expected to get streaming working, but I can now view the action live (well, live-ish if you ignore the 3 second delay) on one or more clients running VLC.

Video can be recorded on the server (i.e. the Raspberry Pi) or on a client.

Raspi-Cam @90 frames per second

The latest RaspberryPi firmware has added an interesting new camera mode allowing 90fps recording.

Video recorded with this mode is encoded at approximately one quarter of the original speed, producing an interesting slow-motion video.

If you have a RaspberryPi and a RaspiCamera you can start using this, and other new modes, by updating firmware from the terminal:-

BirdBoxPiCam2014: updating Time on the RaspberryPi

Ok, so it turned out that using NTP to reset the clock on the Raspberry Pi was not one of my greatest ideas for this project.

NTP is for real computing, where high accuracy is required and small errors need to be slowly tuned out.

My requirements for this bird box project are for a step-change correction each time the system boots up, which may be several times per day. Accuracy is just not important.

BirdBoxPiCam 2014; #3 Camera Modification

The RaspberryPi camera board is a great accessory, but the lens does not give a wide enough viewing angle for use in BirdBoxPiCam 2014.

So this is how I modified the camera assembly to fit an M12 board lens.

The first step is to remove the existing lens from the Pi camera without breaking something.

BirdBoxPiCam 2014; #1 The Plan

I bought my first Raspberry Pi mid-2012 with the idea of using it with a bird box camera.

 

Unfortunately there were problems with the EzCap video capture module driver, and I have still not been able to get this going.

However, now armed with a PiCam I'm hoping for better luck with my new project.