We have a nesting pair of barn owls in the nest box in the barn at my sister’s outdoor pursuits centre and we’d like to be able to show the kids what’s going on in there. I don’t want to disturb them so we may not be able to fit it this year, but I’ve been looking for a decent camera set up to install inside the nest box. The ones I’ve seen so far seem to have pretty terrible resolution and I was wondering if anyone has any experience or recommendations! Since most of the activity is of course happening at night, I guess some king of IR is needed or else I’d just fit a GoPro!

Why not get one of those basic digital camers that are aimed at children, I think they’re pretty robust and have big buttons (the camers, not the shildren) and get the owls to take a selfie every now and again?

You need big buttons to allow easy actuation by wing and, ideally bluetooth or wifi connectivity to enable the pictures to be downloaded without disturbing them.

HTH

You get motion activated nightvision/ir cameras. Can’t speak for a particular model, but a google with those words should sort you out…

I’d get a webcam linked up to a computer so you can view it in real time.
We got some Logitech HD ones at work for recording experiments and they worked well.
Although you’d need to consider IR for watching in the dark. A lot (most) cameras have IR filters in front of the sensor I think, so wouldn’t see anything if you stuck an IR light in.

Have you looked at those sealed wildlife cameras?

Thanks folks, I’ve been looking at the specific wildlife orientated ones with IR and wireless but the resolution looks really low on most of them, I’d prefer something a bit sharper as we’d be feeding it live ideally onto a largeish screen so that everyone can see.

Would one of these be too big?

That might do the job, thank you, although I think the tilt / pan function might scare the owls and hence be redundant….

you could always just not tilt or pan it 🙂

That’s brilliant OP 🙂

As usual I would recommend a Raspberry Pi with one of their camera modules – they even do an IR camera now.

Cheap and not difficult to set up, plus once you’re done with it you can use it as a media streamer at no extra cost!

Barn Porn??? 😆

Old android phone?