Choosing The Best Bird Box Cameras

There are fewer things more exciting to a wildlife lover than seeing a bird moving into a nest box that you have set up.

While many wildlife gardeners and lovers are happy enough to just allow the birds to nest, many want to experience the wonderful occurrences that happen inside these cosy little havens. If you have children, showing them newly hatched chicks is a great way to inspire a love and respect of nature, without climbing trees looking for nests.

Inspired by programmes like Springwatch, more people are setting up bird boxes in their back gardens with cameras already installed or are adapting their current birdboxes to allow an inside view into their lives. As many birdboxes and nests now come pre-fitted with these cameras, there are many things to consider when choosing your dream bird box, such as size, location and wiring.

So, what should you be looking for in a new birdbox?

Live streaming?

The modern world is all about live-streaming and so, if you run a website that looks at nature in your back garden, you may want a camera system that offers a live screening option to your website.

Alternatively, you may want a camera that allows streaming directly to your computer or smartphone, so you can keep an eye on those new hatchlings during your commute. Of course, such additional modern features can prove quite pricey and are not worth the additional cost if you simply wish to download the footage onto your personal computer to watch during your weekends.

Wires vs wireless

Wired birdboxes often offer viewers a superior range of image quality and, of course, do not run the risk of signal failure due to issues like weather conditions or poor connection.

However, to have a wired birdbox, you will need to connect it to your home or classroom, which involves a fair amount of drilling and, if you have young children or other wildlife in your garden, may not be the safest option. Children can obviously trip on wires and garden visitors, such as rats
and mice are particularly fond of nibbling cables!

Wireless options obviously bypass all of these issues and usually come with a battery-box to provide power to the device instead of a cable. However, as mentioned earlier, they are prone to interference issues due to weather and even battery power. Similarly, as nifty as they are, the images provided are often of a lower quality than the cabled counterparts.

Complete kit or camera?

If you already have your bird boxes ready to receive nesting birds, you may only want to purchase a camera to go inside the box.

Be aware however, that to set up a camera in a pre-existing box, it will need to be small enough and quiet enough to not scare off any of your potential feathered visitors.

If you are going for a completed bird box with a kit, these issues are already taken care of and all you will have to do is attach the bird box to a suitable location.

Motion activated

Many wildlife cameras operate via motion detection; if something moves in front of the infra-red light, the camera will turn on.

If you have chosen a wired option, this may not be a factor to consider, but if you have selected a battery powered, cable-less box, it is something to contemplate. This option saves battery life and prevents disturbing any nesting birds in the box by changing the batteries too frequently. It is also more cost effective long-term, as you will not need to purchase excess amounts of batteries.

In this review, we set up 5 bird boxes in our wildlife garden and assessed them for ease of set-up, image quality, ability to cope with changeable weather and of course, in the instances of cable-less options, battery life.

Conclusions and what we learned

So, it seems that in the bird box camera market, cabled cameras are undoubtedly more popular; they provide clearer images and can be easier to set up. And of course, they do not suffer from external issues like the weather or signalling problems.

However, it is unavoidable that none of these boxes came with cable protectors; if you are putting a wire anywhere in an external location, you need to have it covered for protection against animals and to ensure that you don’t fall over it!

Of course, we have to pick a favourite and we have concluded that the box with the best features was the Gardenature Nest Box. With its hard wood exterior and high quality images (and audio), it provides an overall positive experience when viewing your feathered visitors, and, while the cable will need protecting against the external forces, this is a minor inconvenience.

However, we are fairly disappointed in the Green Feathers ‘wireless’ camera; we had hoped to compare the wired to the wireless options in this review but, as it was fairly hard to locate a wireless
camera, we had hoped that this one would do the trick. Of course, requiring a cable to charge the device is fine, but not when it is advertised as a wireless camera. While the image of this camera was exceptional, we just couldn’t get past the false advertising.

If you own your home, it will not matter if you drill holes through the walls to attach cables but, if you rent, it seems that few of these options are suitable for you; many will require rather large holes for the connector cables, meaning that you will not be able to set them up correctly.

Also, some of the boxes themselves appeared to be of fairly poor quality and, oddly enough, while advertised as weather proof, did not seem to be built to withstand the elements very well. A bit concerning for a bird box! However, many of these cameras were able to be removed from the bird
boxes without issue and placed in to pre-existing boxes, so if you are a bit handy at DIY and are unhappy with the condition/structure of the box, this could be a viable option for you to consider. None of these boxes were tricky to set-up and each of them was able to record nesting birds effectively, just to different standards, seemingly based on price.