Despite it being very cold and snow still on the ground, all five of my wired nest boxes have been getting visitors. At the moment, I am ‘in limbo’ with one system running my live cameras and one set of cameras on the new iCatcher console. Those on console are all being remotely monitored and are recording all motion detected. This is fantastic as usually I would not see all the visits to nest boxes and certainly would not be able to record unless I was actually sitting here. The problem now is that I spend ages looking at all the footage and choosing which bits to save and upload!
Hopefully I will have the whole new system up and running in the next few weeks. This will then mean all the cameras are being monitored and live streamed using the icatcher system. I will be able to simply drag the cameras I want to live stream across onto one monitor, giving my followers the best views of the most interesting cameras, as it happens, rather than having to unplug and plug in different cams.
The most activity has been in the nest box I mounted on the lane. This one has internal lighting, but I had taped the sensor over to keep the box dark when they were first looking in. The blue tit had been roosting in this box, but yesterday they starting bringing moss in.
They were in and out all day. The camera flashes from infra-red to daylight as the blue tit comes in because, as it comes into the nest box, the box gets darker and the cam switches to IR. Once the sensor is uncovered, this will stop. In fact, later in the day, I climbed up and removed the insulation tape on the sensor and replaces it with some masking tape. This means the lights are on, on low level now. The blue tits continued to pop in and came back to roost last night.
The Hub nest box saw some nesting material arrive too!
It would be pretty amazing if all 5 nest boxes had occupants! We’ll have to wait and see, but it looks very promising that I am going to have some good footage in at least three. The great tits are in and out of the plum tree box but no nesting materials yet.
It is still early days, but I best get those nest whisks up and out!