My other new camera – a trail camera

Living in the town centre of Sidmouth one might ask why I would want a trail camera. The answer is that I had had a bit of bother with a squirrel that had decided that inside the eaves at the front of our house would make a perfect residence. It turned out in the end that it was a young female squirrel setting up a dray for a litter of kits. But we didn’t know that at the beginning.

We never saw the squirrel to start with and had no idea how it was getting in. But we could hear it, in the middle of the night, doing carpentry in our attic and scrabbling about. It was quite elusive.

Our local pest control man identified the droppings which is how we new it was a squirrel and not rats or bats or something else. I wanted to know where it was getting in and there were a number of possible locations. That is where the trail camera came in.

I bought a PH960W WiFi Trail Camera for £49.88 on Amazon; it came the next day. It’s a great find. The built in battery seems to last for ever. It comes with a micro-SD card; it’s IP66, 1080P and has a 48Mp sensor.

I positioned the camera where it could observe the roof in the critical area, selected high sensitivity and set it to take two stills and 15 secs of video when triggered. It took just two days to catch the squirrel going in through a small hole at the base of a valley. After that it was just a matter of time, and for how long the squirrel could resist peanut butter. Once the squirrel was trapped, the hole was blocked with rodent mesh.

I positioned the camera where it could observe the roof in the critical area, selected high sensitivity and set it to take two stills and 15 secs of video when triggered. It took just two days to catch the squirrel going in through a small hole that shouldn’t have been a hole. After that it was just a matter of time, and for how long the squirrel could resist peanut butter. Once the squirrel had been trapped and taken away, the hole was blocked with rodent mesh.

Now the trail camera is watching a part of our garden where some night-time critter likes to excavate the roots of one of our shrubs. We suspect it’s a bank vole. It would be nice to capture a still of the little fella.