My Smart Home: I turned a £40 security camera into a bird cam
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I’ve spent a small fortune on gadgets for my garden birds. Yet the setup I watch most is a £40 security camera strapped to a post, feeding live footage to an old iPad on my desk. Even the woodpecker’s a regular now.
For as long as I've owned my own house, one of the things I've always enjoyed is feeding the birds that visit my garden.
I spend a small fortune on seed, I've got every type of feeder you can imagine, and the reward is a variety of species that flocks in to soak up this free bounty, which I can watch from my kitchen window.
Happily, there are some great ways you can harness tech to help you keep up with the visitors. And, of course, I'm quite an early adopter.
My first foray into twitching tech was a Birdbuddy Pro, a violently expensive, but incredibly good smart bird feeder that sends you snapshots of all the birds that visit.
In recent years, the Birdbuddy has been replaced with tech from a much more affordable brand, Birdfy. Their feeders still aren't cheap but they work well, and they're easy to use.
Birdfy has also branched out into smart nest boxes and a smart bird bath. Both of which I have up and running in my garden.
The nest box isn't really seeing any customers yet, but it's the wrong time of year. The bird bath has a regular woodpigeon visiting, and it's always a delight to get fed a video of what my wife calls "Percy" taking a dip.
My main feeding station is my favourite garden accessory, though, and it's becoming very busy, especially as we move towards winter.
In case you're interested, and you probably are if you've read this far, I've had some really interesting species landing on it. I've had every type of tit you can get in a garden, then various finch species, the occasional nuthatch, the obligatory robin, and I'm getting fairly frequent visits from a greater-spotted woodpecker.
I know this not because I stand at my kitchen window for hours, but because I've rigged up a camera. This idea pre-dated Birdfy and even the Birdbuddy, but I strap a wired Tapo outdoor camera to a nearby piece of furniture, face it at the feeder, and I can watch the birds come and go all day from an old iPad I have sitting on my desk.
The camera is a Tapo TC65, which you can buy for around £40, the iPad cost me less than £100, but you can use any old tablet, and I think the bracket I use cost me a tenner on Amazon.
You can even feed the footage directly to your computer screen. It's a complicated process, but AI walked me through it.
I do love the Birdfy kit, but this is a really affordable way to make the most of the time and money you spend keeping your feathered friends fed and watered.
Just remember the most important rule - always clean down your feeding station, every week if possible. There are some nasty diseases out there that can wipe out a local flock. If only there was a way for tech to take over that task, I'd be a very happy man.