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Nature Photography & Optics

Seeking nest box camera suggestions

15 years ago

I would like to set up 1 or 2 bluebird inside nest box cameras as part of a class lesson plan. Can anyone give me some suggestions as to where I can purchase these kits? Should I go solar? If you have done this with your school I'd love to hear about your experience. Any input on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

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Comments (2)

juanital
15 years ago
Sialis.org has a lot of useful information-including nest cams...Hope this helps!

Here is a link that might be useful: Nest cams...
gymell
15 years ago
I know my answer is WAAAY afer the fact, but I thought I'd post anyway. I have the Hawk Eye Video
Camera in my bluebird box at home, where I had chickadees nesting last summer. It has a 100' foot A/V cable that hooks up directly to a TV with RCA audio/video jacks. The power cord is in the same cable, and I just run it though a window. I use Pinnacle Video Transfer and Pinnacle Studio to capture the video as mpeg and make YouTube videos. I also burned a DVD. I dug a trench and laid PVC pipe for the cable to run through underground. The only thing I had a problem with was radio interference in the audio. I couldn't figure out how to get rid of it, so for most of the summer I left the audio cable unplugged. Toward the end of the nest I plugged it back in, and the figured out how to get rid of the interference through noise reduction in the Pinnacle software. Here's an example from YouTube: Overlook Circle Chickadee Nest July 10-15 , 2008. The last 7 minutes has audio (when I finally figured out how to get rid of the interference.) The YouTube quality isn't quite as good as what you'll see directly from the camera or when you burn a DVD at the highest quality. It was really cool to see and I'm sure kids would love it!
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