Webcam – Donich Website

Another good one

donich_admin — Sun, 19 Mar 2017 20:27:40 +0000

Definitely the best time of the year for wildlife. This little roe stag visited the webcam area around tea time and made a meal of part of one of our bushes (a very prickly one but they don’t seem to mind the thorns). You can see the velvet on his lovely new antlers

Click on the picture to see the video.

Badger on new Webcam

donich_admin — Tue, 24 May 2016 17:40:33 +0000

We have a new webcam with better resolution. Unfortunately this means that we are having difficulty getting it to activate for the wildlife – and at the moment we are largely getting photos of the cats on their nocturnal wanderings.

But yesterday we got a nice shot of a badger – unusually this time it was in the daylight – around 5am. I actually think what tripped the camera was the large crow you can see in the foreground.

Click on the image to see the video.

Another house with visitors

donich_admin — Mon, 11 May 2015 18:35:57 +0000

A number of people locally have commented on how lucky R and I are to have all the wildlife in the garden. I actually think that it is not so much that we are lucky – as that most people in Lochgoilhead don’t know about the wildlife they have themselves because they are not seeing it as it only appears intermittently and/or at night.

For example, I have seen badgers here on hundreds of occasions, but never in the daytime. Whilst I have actually been outside to physically see them from time to time – without the webcam I would never have realized how often they are actually around. With the Marten I have seen it from the window a couple of times, but would never have know it was there in the first place if it hadn’t been on the camera logs.

So this leads me on to a real life example. One of our friends was telling me that a food bin in his shed was regularly being ‘raided’ by some creature. He suspected the identity of the criminal but didn’t know for sure… So we lent him a motion detection camera, and sure enough a few days later it captured evidence that the thief was in fact a pine marten.

So I’d encourage anyone who is interested in wildlife to set up a webcam in a likely spot in their garden and see if they capture anything. Of course we are particularly fortunate here in Lochgoilhead, but even in urban areas you never know what you could see….

Amazing Otter shots

donich_admin — Sat, 24 May 2014 16:13:20 +0000

I was just idling flicking through the ‘shedcam’ videos yesterday when I saw something really interesting. While we must quite literally have been sitting in the kitchen having our breakfast, a large otter suddenly shot across the camera’s field of vision and disappeared through the fence. I was super glad to see it again because it had not made an appearance on either camera since March and ‘pondcam’ is not great for night shots (there is too much life of the insect variety which generates a load of false positives).

A few mysteries however… What is it doing in the back garden? Why is it soaking wet when it is going to the river and not coming from it?

A thrilling sight though….

Now and in colour…

donich_admin — Sun, 18 May 2014 14:39:24 +0000

I’ve been hoping that with the ever shortening hours of darkness, we would be able to get some daylight video of our pine marten. We caught him having his nut snack early yesterday morning, and then to our surprise, my brother glimpsed him shooting past the patio windows at six in the evening the same day. So he is getting bolder and more confident – obviously the cats are not scaring him off.

Of course ‘he’ may be ‘she’ and there may be a den of babies to feed. But regardless of gender, he is even more beautiful in the video where you can see his fantastic chestnut coat and creamy bib.

Heron

marionmccune — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 12:51:47 +0000

The heron we saw the other day seems to be making a pitch for our pond (or minature loch). There are several small islands in the middle, and it is visiting one of them for an hour or two every morning. When it sees us coming it flies off and returns to stalking down the ditch at the edge of the path looking for frogs. Its wingspan is simply amazing…..

This morning we caught a video of it on the new pond cam, coming in to land like a 747… I have a feeling it is thinking about a nest site on its island. I suppose this would be reasonably safe from foxes and other native predators and I am sure the cats wouldn’t tackle an adult heron (if it has young ones – that would be a different matter.

TARRAA!!

marionmccune — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 21:25:58 +0000

We have…. Badgers. Or one badger at least. We bated the camera trap with a load of peanuts and sure enough at about 9:30pm (must have been just after we turned the kitchen lights out) he came through the fence and had a good snuffle about. When he saw that the nuts were in the cage he tried to get them through the bars, and then put his nose under the edge to get them. When both of these techniques failed, he just took the bars in his jaws and wrenched the thing right out of the ground. He must be incredibly strong. After that he deserved his snack and sat there for about fifteen minutes munching away – only occasionally pausing to sniff the air and glance around. When everything was finished he unhurriedly made his way back through the fence and disappeared.

Life is full of….

marionmccune — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 20:23:17 +0000

Disappointments. The camera worked brilliantly – we could see little voles running about getting a few of the nuts, the wind moving the trees etc. All until about 1:30am when the picture mysteriously cut out. Two hours later it started recording again, but by then the cages had been torn out of the ground, the suet ball was long gone, and no sign of our visitor. I can hardly believe that whatever eats suet balls at night also sabotages technology, but that is what it looks like at the moment. Try again tonight but whatever it is isn’t getting another one of those every night – I looked on the website and they are £7 each….

Cameras

marionmccune — Sat, 02 Nov 2013 16:38:04 +0000

So following on from the mysterious disappearing suet ball, we have decided to fit a couple of Webcams. One of them we will attach to our potting shed which is right next to the bird feeding area, and the other will go on the side of the summerhouse which is right next to the pond (I call it a pond but I suppose at about 12 yards across it is more like a small lake). I am hoping that when spring and summer come we will get animals and birds coming to drink there. The cameras are Foscams – they have a wireless interface for connecting to our internal network but they need mains power – luckily both the shed and the summerhouse have this – but at some time in the future (way down the long list of things to do – I would like to have some that would run off a solar panel). Critically they have night vision capability which works really well – the resolution is great and the only difference from the daylight photos is that the night time ones are in black and white. We have a special ‘Super Large’ suet ball which came as a present in an RSPB boxed set – so we will put it in the cage as a honeytrap. Hopefully we will get a look at our thief tonight…