Yote

I haven't checked the trail cameras in the national forest south of town since Feb. 1, so I did that today before we get hit again with a major winter storm. The weather people say 8-12 inches, but we don't know if that is way up in the mountains and less at lower elevations. Based on the past few storms, we may get 2-4 down here. I grew up in northern latitudes but not in the mountains, so getting a major snowfall at the end of April does not seem right.

Anyway, we have a somewhat fuzzy image of a coyote with something large in its mouth. I dare say it looks like about the size of a house cat. Then we got a healthy-looking coyote, probably the same one, a few yards away a week later. And we have the usual deer running around.

Closer, closer

After some experimentation, it is now 18 inches from the Gardepro lens to the nest box hole. I often put cameras within 3-4 feet, but this one is so close that I think it interferes with the birds' flight path. I need to point it further right and hopefully get some quicker triggers. This is one of the better ones so far. I will continue to crop off the sides because of lens distortion, which precludes using the info strip.

Trailcampro gave this camera a 95/100 on image quality. I would give it about a 72, but no camera I have is better than an 78 on my scale. The newest Browning and the two Reconyx are probably toward the top of that range. (And I think Trailcampro is the exclusive distributor for three of Gardepro's cameras from China, so now I wonder how impartial their reviews are.) I like the close focus and I won't send it back, but they could make these so much better. At what price, I don't know.

Getting closer

I now have a full day of actual images from the new Gardepro camera instead of 23,000 false triggers. It took 691 images in 26 hours, and a good percentage of those included an actual bluebird. It was a very windy day and the camera tipped into the fence for a few hours before righting itself, so there may have been some triggers from wind movement. There were no triggers from 4:37 pm yesterday to 7:50 this morning. I have about a six-hour quiet window programmed in for overnight, not 13 hours. Maybe the bluebirds weren't active, maybe the camera doesn't trigger well in low light. Which is actually fine with me. The file information of various images shows a constant f-stop of 2.0, ISO ranging from 100-120, and shutter speed of 1/6,800 to 1/35,000. That's just wild. There should never be any motion blur if those numbers are accurate.

This is definitely a wide, wide lens, and it does close focus as advertised. There were a few images of the bird flying right into the camera and it was in focus from just a few inches away. The Browning images would be completely blurry. I move the camera in from 23 inches to 18 inches. I also lowered the camera a few inches, and pointed it a bit more to the right.

The images have an odd Photoshop special effects look to them, like the Artistic Watercolor filter. It's probably just oversharpening. As I mentioned yesterday, I intend to crop the distorted corners out of these images, and that's what I did with these.

So I'm happy with the close-up capability, more satisfied with the trigger sensitivity than I was yesterday, and disappointed in the oversharpening (which all trailcam manufacturers do).

New camera

Thursday I deployed my new Gardepro trail camera, which I have designated as camera #14. After a few test shots, I bumped up the image resolution from 4mp to 8mp before setting it next to the bluebird box. Even though the sensor probably is only 4mp, I have this theory that they do the interpolation before applying the heavy-handed sharpening that trailcam makers love so much, so it might not look quite so garish when I resize the image back down to my standard size of 1800 pixels across (4x6 print size). I also turned off the info strip because it is rather large AND I expect to be cropping out the corners, which show quite a bit of wide angle distortion. File information indicates the lens is 18mm equivalent, which is very wide in comparison to all my other cameras. Since the camera claims to be close focusing, I set it 24 inches from the center of the bluebird box. I may try moving it even closer, 18-20 inches.

I collected the memory card Friday and found that the camera had fired off 22,477 images in 27 hours, which was really about 17 hours because there were no images overnight. That reminds me of the late lamented Moultrie #3 that perished in a forest fire in 2017. It was famous for pumping out 80,000 images of waving grass in a matter of days. I turned the sensitivity on the Gardepro down from High to Low, which helped a lot but didn't eliminate the false triggers entirely. It doesn't make sense to me, but the manual actually says not to set sensitivity to High except in warm weather, which we have not had this week. (High today, 37.) There were bluebirds (and swallows) today, but I haven't seen any images of them in flight coming in, so at some point after it warms up, I may have to risk cranking sensitivity up to Medium.

The design of the camera is fairly standard, except the screen is on the door of the camera, unlike the Brownings which have it on the body. Thus the Gardepro screen can not be used to frame the scene, which is theoretically possible with the Brownings. In practice, the Browning screens are hard to see in harsh light, and your melon gets in the way as you try to get close enough to see what is in the frame.

So far I would say it is a step up from my crippled old Melted Browning #6, but we'll see how quickly it burns through batteries if it keeps firing off false triggers.

While I was away

While I was off shooting the total eclipse in Texas, Melted Browning #6 was monitoring the bluebird box. There seems to be a pair that is settling in, and I hope this year they aren't evicted by the swallow squatters.

I'm trying to post at least one photo on my web site for every day of the year, and this image will fill the hole for April 5. I think after this one, I only have four open dates. But it may be time to retire Melted Browning #6, and also #5 which is the same model. There's way too much pixelization here.

I was looking at newer Brownings and a Bushnell, but on a whim I decided to get a Gardepro T5CF. This is one of the few cameras supposedly optimized for close focus, and Trailcampro rates the image quality very high. Looking at the sample images there is some wide angle distortion, but they seem to be sharp in the middle. It is relatively cheap ($129.95) and it has to be better than what these old Brownings are giving me. There still should be months of bluebird action to test it on when it arrives in a few days.

A similar shot from a few days earlier.

A few days later, snow.

On April 12, the wind came up and knocked the camera over. It got a few shots after that, including a sequence of a small airplane flying by and this lens flare. For some reason I thought of my camera lying there dying and thinking, "Will I dream?" (HAL in 2001.)

Early bluebird

I saw a male bluebird land on the nest box today, the first of the season. I quick set out the remote trigger DSLR and the #6 trail camera (Melted Browning) but got nothing to prove what I saw.

There's a few inches of snow on the ground, much less than last year at this time. My first post last year was late April, and in 2022 it was early April.

Update: The bluebird flew in front of the trailcam on the 17th and 19th. I apparently forgot to reset the date/time when I changed the batteries on the camera so it is edited on this image.