We’ve been surrounded by nature since we moved out of London opting for a greener, more simple life in Dorset.
It didn’t take long before I decided to look for a fun affordable trail camera for capturing wildlife in the area surrounding the house, aka the garden.
I recommend anyone with an interest in wildlife, or perhaps with kids (to entertain them… not to monitor them), to get one as they are extremely fun and educational.
Even if you live in a flat in a city, you could leave one in your local wood to capture local wildlife, away from where people walk and it probably wouldn’t disappear as they are quite stealthy.
With a trail camera you get to observe animal behaviour (albeit in fairly low quality) which isn’t spoilt by human presence. It’s quite remarkable however how many animals, especially foxes, sniff it out and notice that it is a bit odd left there.
The one I bought is an APEMAN Wildlife Camera Upgraded Version Photo Trap 20MP 1080 with Infrared Night Vision for only £80. I actually got two.
I think APEMAN has now upgraded this camera to 30mp and 4K for an even cheaper price on Amazon.
Listen… It’s a very fun camera, don’t expect to film the next Planet Earth in collaboration with David Attenborough.
There are many flaws, often animals will be blurry or the high ISO will make extremely grainy shots… but sometimes you hit the jackpot.
And with the right expectations knowing it only costs 65 quid, you’re up for a treat.
In the course of a few weeks we managed to capture lots of local deer, badgers, foxes, rabbits… and way too many pheasants.
I usually look for animal trails, these are very visible as most animals use them, they are like roads to us humans.
I then look for a little clearing and a tree I can tie the camera to, usually at waist level or higher, depending on what you are looking to capture.
I found a wild apple tree which is alive at night with animals coming to feast on fallen apples.
I like deer but want to avoid the hundreds of local pheasants and birds triggering it non-stop so I usually set it quite high at chest level, this avoids the smaller ground level rodents and birds setting it off.
You have the option to take photos or capture a video or both. What I find is that while video is the most fun to capture it also means batteries and SD cards run out a lot quicker.
I eventually bought rechargeable AA batteries as it was costing me a fortune in batteries.
That to me is the only real negative, I hate using batteries, why couldn’t this have a USB charge port?
I need to look into getting a solar panel for it actually.
But really aside from this it’s great, it is fully rain-proof, it’s camouflaged, it straps easily to trees and it captures fun and interesting footage and photos. It even can shoot timelapse which could make it a good option for capturing construction timelapse as the camera doesn’t risk the weather over long periods of time.
Not bad right?
I think it is a great educational tool to help you discover your local wildlife and I recommend anyone get a camera like this if you have inquisitive children or adults in the house.
If you love wildlife you may also be interest in the wildlife photography article I recently wrote, the link is below.
Until next time,
Nico