Wildlife camera - night vision and wifi (2 Viewers)

[Peregrine Took]

Can anyone recommend a night vision wildlife camera, preferably with wifi? I know next to nothing about them and the choices seem endless, so I thought I'd start by asking here.

Budget is about £150.00 maximum. I'd need one with a wifi range of about 40 metres; if wifi isn't the best idea for these devices, please explain. We see evidence of deer, foxes and badgers, visiting the garden, so it would be nice to capture them, so to speak.

Thanks!



PS. I'm sorted now (see #9), but if you think the thread, and any further contributions, will be of interest to others please carry on.
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[Mono]

You have two options.
A trail camera/camera trap. A set out and leave box battery powered box that has a sensor and a camera and takes stills/video of anything that walks in front of it. They can have a battery life of months (depending on your settings and the number of captures) they record the images on a card and you can get the pictures by physically retrieving the box. Some do have their own WiFi this is to enable you to download the images from them without moving the camera.

The second option is an always on security style camera. This would need to have power wired to it (there are solar powered ones but I have no experience of how long they last). These cameras connect to the net via your WiFi and will send alerts and live pictures if they detect anything. You can be walking round Tesco and you phone will ping and show you a picture of next doors cat!

The first option is more flexible and much more easy to set up. It also has the option of portability, if you go on holiday you can take it with you and check out the local wildlife. The second is a more permanent option but has the advantage that you can sit on your sofa and watch live.

 

[Mono]

Sorry forgot recommendations!

As for a camera trap I am very happy with my Acorn.

Wildlife Camera - low cost and easy to use

The Ltl Acorn 5210A wildlife camera offers 1080P motion activated video recording with audio. Weatherproof, cable free and very easy to use.

pakatak.co.uk

It is compact and reliable, turns on quickly. Some cameras have too long a time between detecting something and taking the picture and your subject has walked out of shot. I have the no glow IR one, if you are putting it anywhere humans might see it then the glowing ones are asking to get nicked.

I can't really recommend are of the live cameras, my most recent experience is quite a few years old and there have been massive changes in the market in the last few years they are many more devices out there.

 

[Peregrine Took]

Thanks Mono, that's just the sort of rudimentary advice I was looking for. I'll go for the no-glow camera trap and forget about wifi / live view.

Possibly another dumb question, but with camera traps, do they shoot both normally (as our eyes see things) during the day, and IR at night? Or do they only capture IR? I quite like IR photography, so I'm not bothered either way.

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[Torchepot]

Another vote for a no-glow trail camera - I currently have three and get mine from Naturespy who have a really good website.
The cameras shoot in colour during the day and black and white after dark, some of the very latest have extremely fast response times - improving your chance of getting footage of something strolling past.
There’s a bit of a learning curve with regards to positioning and set up but plenty of help is available online.

If I was going to buy another I’d probably go for a Browning no-glow - best reviews for response time for videos.

P.S. Naturespy have a sale on the Browning Spec Ops Advantage camera at the moment - £50 off - very fast and highly rated camera.

 

[Peregrine Took]

Thanks Torchepot - Naturespy looks a good site.

Next question. Does the IR flash in these things act more like video lighting, in the sense that they don't really 'flash' in an instant, like a photographic flash, but permanently illuminate the subject, once sensed? Hope that makes sense.
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[Torchepot]

I don’t use mine for stills - only video, and when the IR is triggered (at night) it tends to come on quite powerfully and then auto dim to the correct exposure - then stays on for the duration of the video. The IR - even the no glow - is visible to some animals in some situations and some are wary of it. Given the right conditions people can sometimes detect it too.

For photos I believe you get a flash of IR more like a camera flash - some trail cameras even use white light for night time stills and give colour results I seem to recall - but I have no experience of that kind of camera.

 

[Mono]

My camera makes a slight click when in activates, I think it is the IR filter moving, this can lead to animals looking straight at the camera. As others have said you need to play with settings to get the best for your location and the activity of the targets. One to watch is the time between activations, the camera will wait a preset time after it has taken a picture before it allows itself to be triggered again. Set this too long and you can miss stuff set it too short and you can get hundreds of activations per day and blow through the batteries.

 

[Peregrine Took]

My wife is buying the Browning Spec Ops Advantage as I write this. I don't think we'll use it for stills either. Naturespy seems like an all-round decent company - I like the ethos and a really useful website, FAQs etc., for newbies like me. Thanks guys.
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[Torchepot]

My wife is buying the Browning Spec Ops Advantage as I write this. I don't think we'll use it for stills either. Naturespy seems like an all-round decent company - I like the ethos and a really useful website, FAQs etc., for newbies like me.

What a coincidence - my wife just bought me one from them too!

They are a really decent company and very helpful if you ever have any issues. Good luck with your new camera - hope you get some good captures. I have a long list of critters that I’ve got with mine - including some big surprises!

 

[Allen]

Apologies for hijacking this thread, I've recently replaced my old trailcam with a Bushnell Core DS No Glow but find that it drains batteries almost nightly when it gets triggered a lot in the garden at night by feeding hedgehogs/cats/foxes. I find this surprising for a Bushnell given that most of the nature documentaries seem to use Bushnell and the company extolls the battery life of several months and I am using the recommended Lithium Energiser batteries. Just wondered if anyone else uses the same model and has the same issue....or doesn't. For example; I have set video time for 10 seconds with an interval of 5 seconds. Last night it recorded 227 videos ( I have active hedgehogs!) but the last 36 decreased from 5 seconds long down to 1 second rather than the programmed 10 seconds. However once daylight arrived it was back to recording 10 seconds.
I appreciate that that is a lot of videos but surely not unexpected if e.g. nature researchers stuck one out in a rainforest so I queried it with the company I bought it through and they advised "You may need to increase your interval,................They are absolutely used by researchers etc worldwide, but not taking that amount of video each night."
Any thoughts from anyone?

 

[Mono]

I would say it is down to the sheer number of activations. I set my interval to at least a minute, if not five minutes if I think it might be an active site. The reduction in length at night is the battery voltage going down under the load of the IR lights.

Many wild sites can have much lower density than one imagines, I have used cameras traps in South African reserves and would get 1 or 2 activations a day.

 

[snowyowl]

I have two Brownings and a Wildgame. All three cameras do an OK job but I prefer the Brownings because they do either stills or video.

 

[Allen]

I would say it is down to the sheer number of activations. I set my interval to at least a minute, if not five minutes if I think it might be an active site. The reduction in length at night is the battery voltage going down under the load of the IR lights.

Many wild sites can have much lower density than one imagines, I have used cameras traps in South African reserves and would get 1 or 2 activations a day.

Thanks Mono...I'll try extending the period between trigger and also maybe avoid feeding areas.