The First Yew View Otter Holt Camera goes in as the Badgers move in again….

There has been quite a lot of camera maintenance to do over the last few weeks at Yew View. With so much cabling and technology, it all needs checking and maintaining. It can be time consuming when cameras go down, as it can take a while to troubleshoot where the issue is and then to resolve it.

Our Kingfisher cam has been a bit hit and miss at the moment, but it has recorded some clips showing us that the kingfishers are still around, but not as regularly as they have been in the past. It is always fantastic to see them though….

One of the other cameras picked up this muntjac pair early one morning, by one of our other badger setts. It always amazes me that they stay on site as there are lots of dogs, but I have filmed them quite a lot in the last month or so…..

It has been very quiet in the badger sett chambers over the summer. A few visits, but very little activity. This often happens. This is a satellite sett, so only gets used sporadically and it is about 1/2 mile from the main sett. Over the last month, a number of individuals have started sleeping in here, sometimes for long periods in the night and once for a whole day. One of them is the female who visited a lot last year. She las a lump on her muzzle. There are two youngsters with her; probably her cubs from this year. There seems to be another female with them too. This is the most individuals we have had in the chamber at one time and I’m delighted to see them back again!

I have been waiting to get the cameras inside the new otter holt. Due to the location of this holt, we have had to put another power supply in and a network switch. This switch then had to be connected to another switch (which involved a lot of fiddling and accessing of ports). Dave and I had built some frames on which to mount the cameras, so they could easily be lowered into the holt. They need to be able to be removed for maintenance and cleaning and also if the river floods. The cameras have been loaned to us by Hikvision and they are dome IP cameras, that can be zoomed and focused via the PC.

You can never be really sure what the image is going to be like inside a space like this, until you lower the camera in….. it is quite nerve-wracking, as a lot of time and money has been invested in this project! I was delighted! At full view, I can see the whole chamber and I can zoom in to a section of it, hopefully where an otter….. or another animal may sleep. I still have some work to do inside the chamber and some slight camera adjustments, but I feel I am finally making progess…. it is very exciting.

The camera is linked to iCatcher Console, so will record any  early visitors. I had another camera mounted, facing the river and the lower entrance. This week I filmed both mink and otter….

I hope to get the other camera in in the next week and finished the chambers and seal them up… then it just a matter of waiting with fingers crossed…….



from www.wildlifekate.co.uk https://wildlifekate.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/the-first-yew-view-otter-holt-camera-goes-in-as-the-badgers-move-in-again/

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