Camera Information

Camera 1 is a small CCD camera with 6 infrared LEDs for night viewing.

Camera 2 is a slightly larger CMOS color camera, with a built-in microphone (we hope to supply streaming audio next year, but this year, you'll have to be lucky enough to be at Ranger Steve and Junior Ranger Deborah's house to hear any sounds!).

Cameras 1 and 2 are installed in the top of the nestbox, in a piece of 4" PVC, sealed and waterproofed.

Camera 3 is a color/black-and-white camera with a whole slew of infrared LEDs, in a waterproof housing.

The nestbox and the exterior camera are "predator-proofed" with Nixalite Bird Spikes.

The nestbox is mounted at a height of approximately 20'. The pole is set in concrete and held in place with steel cable guy-wires (we added more guy-wires this year, to help reduce the slight swaying in very high winds that we saw last year...a lot of people spent some very tense nights watching the female kestrel on the eggs as the box swayed ~1" in high winds! There was never any danger, but it was a bit unnerving to see!).

The only problem with this system is that, if we get any kestrels (keep your fingers crossed!), we can't take it down to clean the lens if it gets dirty (kestrel nestlings defecate upwards against the walls, and it could get on the cameras), nor can we get in to let a licensed expert band the birds. We're looking for a system for next year (Purple Martin housing poles come to mind, but I don't know if that would work or not...ideas are welcome!).

The nestbox itself is made by American Artifacts, and we gratefully acknowledge Richard van Vleck for all of his help and advice in setting up the box properly.

The exterior camera is mounted at a height of about 5' using the same type of system.

Camera 4 is just a little color CMOS camera that we stuck near our hummingbird feeder. We may move it to something more interesting if we get a chance, such as a songbird nest, etc., but since it's not waterproof, the possible locations are limited.

All of this is powered using 12V regulated power supplies, and the whole mess of cables comes in to KestrelCam Central (our family room), where we split some signals so that the neighbors can also get real-time live video and audio. The four video signals are sent to an Express 6 Video Server from Stardot Technologies. This nifty little box lets us individually control and configure just about everything for each camera, from hue and saturation to ftp update rate and image size and compression quality. We still have 2 available video ports on this device, so if something interesting happens, we'll add more cameras!

From there, the images are sent to our Linksys WRT-54G wireless/wired router, thence to our cable modem and out to the various ftp sites (Cornell University's Nestbox Cam Network), or our webpage hosting service, depending on how they're used.

The whole thing looks like this: