Wildlife camera - suggestions?

Richard53

I would like to get a camera that can record wildlife that comes into my garden. Ideally, it would be weatherproof, battery powered, record to an SD card in a format that the PC can read, and have both a motion sensor and night capability. The idea would be to mount it on a tree or somewhere in the garden and record any night-time 'visitors'. (I know we get a lot of foxes and badgers, but I would like to see them rather then just step in what they have left behind!) An additional benefit would be if I could mount it at the front of the house when we go away to act as a kind of security camera, and make a record of any visitors to the house. We live out in the country, so it wouldn't be triggered by hundreds of passers-by, just if someone actually came onto the property and approached the house.

I've seen various cameras on ebay and other online suppliers, but I wondered if anyone had actually used one and could give some advice. Budget would be about £80-£90 or thereabouts.

googler

Take a look on the RSPB website, or a more specialised forum such as wildaboutbritain ...

neilwoods

You have the outback camera made by swann, about £90 from maplin or £86 from amazon.

Got the bushnell camera, more expensive at £190. Rspb do one for about £180.

So there quite a few out there, need to remember though, as they are a standalone device, if used as security camera for when away, it would need to be either quite high up or make extremely hard to pinch.

Most will do same job, use pir to trigger, have night vision, not very far (30 - 40ft), record short lengths of video (between 2min to 10min) or capture single images.

Richard53

Thanks for the suggestions - they sound like the thing I am looking for. I have a telegraph pole close to the front of the property (and on my land) where I can mount it good and high if needed, so the security of the camera itself isn't a problem.

PIR, night vision, still or movie - sounds great. I assume they will all record in a common format, such as .avi, .mpeg etc? I only ask this because I bought a superb camcorder a while ago, only to find that it recorded on mini-DVDs and it was a very long and boring process to download and convert the files for sharing with others. I didn't do my homework on that occasion.

Thanks for the replies.

neilwoods

I know the swann outback camers records .avi or jpeg for stills. Either take out card and put into laptop or card reader or attack usb cable to the camera and download that way