Blue Tit chicks hatched

Photos from Friday, six of the seven Blue Tit eggs have clearly hatched.

Food!

Broken egg shell to recycle

Blue Tit eggs

In addition to automatically monitoring my TrailCam, the garden based Raspberry Pi has continued to watch the Blue Tits in Bird Box III which have this year laid a clutch of seven eggs, averaging one a day.

No eggs

One week later, seven eggs

Raspberry Pi down the Garden

I'm now installed a Raspberry Pi with two webcams at the bottom of the garden using passive power over ethernet with a 40m cable. In the autumn I tested this indoors to catch invading mice, but now the snow has gone and spring seems to be on its way...

Raspberry Pi, passive POE, and DC voltage step-down squeezed in a box

Power Over Ethernet for Raspberry Pi

This weekend I tested powering my Raspberry Pi and two webcams via a simple passive Power Over Ethernet (PoE) adapter. Success! It was only a 2m ethernet cable, but I hope to use about 40m in order to set this up at the bottom of the garden to monitor the webcams in my bird boxes.

Raspberry Pi serving two webcams under Motion, 5V supplied by PoE

Sparrows Nesting

After the disappointment of no residents in Bird Boxes 1 & 2, and the evicted blue tits in Bird Box 3, I was delighted to find Bird Box 4 in use - even if it wasn't by woodpeckers, but by sparrows. This was probably my favourite photo:

Rather than regular photos collected automatically, I was only able to check the camera periodically by taking a laptop down the garden - it was far beyond USB range.

Widescreen upgrade for Birdbox 1

Over the weekend I upgraded my first Birdbox webcam to the improved design I used for the Woodpecker nest box camera, with a wide angle lens to capture the whole floor, and splayed IR LEDs to avoid whiteout/glare.

Xbox webcam original lens, forward IR LEDs

Xbox webcam, 2.8mm CCTV lens, splayed IR LEDs

During the upgrade I considered replacing the camera mounting in order to rotate the camera, but decided the confined box made it too much effort. With the new lens I can now capture the whole floor and some of the side walls - the view shifted slightly while reattaching the box to the wall - but it will do.

Blue Tit in residence

This evening I popped down the garden to check the webcam in Birdbox 3, to see how the blue tit nest was coming along (after the occupying tree sparrows gave up), and for the first time was able to watch a live feed of a bird in the box:

That was a nice surprise - I left them to their snooze.

Birdbox Battle Vol 2

We had a pair of Blue Tits building a nest in BirdBox 3, but they were usurped by Tree Sparrows.

5 April 2012 - Tree Sparrows

Xbox Birdbox Mk IV: Woodpecker nest box

I found this Woodpecker nest box at the top of a shelf at a local independent Garden Centre gathering dust, and at £16 it seemed worth a try, given Greater Spotted Woodpeckers have been fairly regular visitors to our garden.

Woodpecker nest box

Male Greater Spotted Woodpecker eating peanuts

Birdbox Battles

A bird box can be a dangerous place... photos from Saturday morning after the Blue Tits have been setting up home for about a week:

Is breakfast ready?

A nice sharp beak

Open wide!

Birdbox Update for the week

At the moment at least, not that many people seem to be reading the bird box blog posts, perhaps because thus far they've been more on the technical side of setting up the cameras and infrared illumination. So here are a few more pictures...

Xbox Birdbox Mk III

Yes, I made a third bird box with an infrared modified Xbox Live Vision webcam. This used 4 IR LEDs as in my original design, but splayed even more than in my second attempt.

4 IR LEDs on webcam

Crude wooden clamps

Webcam installed in birdbox

Night Vision Xbox webcam bird box Mk II

I've already made one DIY IR LED Night Vision Xbox webcam for a bird box, and since I had some infrared LEDs left over, I decided to make another: Xbox Birdbox Mk II. This time I selected a taller bird box to ensure I capture the entire floor in the webcam's field of view, and tried six directional LEDs splayed to try to get more indirect lighting.

6 IR LED Xbox webcam

Gardman Nest Box & webcam

Xbox birdbox first visitor (and second)

After three nights up on the wall, my new "Xbox Birdbox" (bird nesting box with an IR night vision modified Xbox Live Vision webcam) recorded its first visitor using the 'Motion' automated webcam monitoring software. It was probably a blue great tit, but as the images are infrared dominated it is hard to be sure of the colouration - there is only a hint of yellow in some of the frames. This would have been a great image except for the focus:

IR Night Vision Xbox webcam birdbox

I've already talked about removing the red glass filter in an Xbox Live Vision webcam to make it infrared sensitive - what I did next was add some infrared emitting LEDs to the camera so it can see in the dark. Not for astrophotography, but for close range night vision - inside a birdbox.