Our Bushnell Adventures at Michael Drayton Junior

Our ‘Bushnell Boys’ have continued their quest to capture the wildlife in our school grounds. We have been using some Bushnell trail cameras in our Wild Learning Area with some great results (see our previous blog posts). The boys wanted to build a platform on which to feed the visitors, particularly a couple of buzzards who have been coming down to feast. We have been collecting the meaty remains of school dinners and putting them out.

The boys had rescued some old PE equipment that was being thrown out and we decided to use that to help us create a raised platform.

First, they unscrewed the top off and fixed a pallet on top instead.

We needed somewhere to put the food, so we used a piece of artificial turf. Then we had the idea of screwing some branches down on top. We thought this would be somewhere for the buzzard to land and also it would hold the turf down on the surface.

Finally, we screwed a long arm on, so we could mount the Bushnell. We put the 60cm lens on so we could see if we could get some close up footage.

We were ready for action!

We made a couple of short clips and linked them into a little video to explain what we had done….

After a week, we had a look at the footage. As we had thought, we had quite a lot of cat interest, but the fox did come as we’ll and we got close-ups of his feet! We got one visit by the buzzard and got great views of his talons. We need to set the camera back a bit and pointing up a bit more now. We have also set another camera a little way away that has view of the whole platform.

Here’s the first footage we captured… lots of room for improvement, but wonderful nevertheless!

It is very exciting and the pupils just love setting these cameras up and then seeing what has visited! They are a great way for kids to use technology to engage with the natural world.

 

 

from www.wildlifekate.co.uk https://wildlifekate.wordpress.com/2018/11/27/our-bushnell-adventures-at-michael-drayton-junior/