Bird-Friendly Bird-Lovers, Bordering on Bird-Voyeurs…

24 February 2018

We have a number of bird nesting facilities at the Ballot Box, and I suspect we’ll have even more once we move up here permanently.  Our first accommodation was a swallow house that we mount on a fence-post each spring.  It’s been used every year so far, is visible from our dining area table and is great entertainment as spring progresses.  We soon added a wren house on a post at the edge of the woods on the other side of the leach field that is also heavily used, and a couple of generic houses on trees just into the woods on the deck side of the house, by the brook.

Our most recent addition is a phoebe shelf that we added before last spring, mounted up under the deck and between the joists at the Ballot Box.  It got used a lot – at least two sets of fledges, maybe more! We tried to peek down through the deck boards at the nest with mediocre success, but it was busy most of the spring and into the early summer.

In an initially unrelated event, I bought a USB video borescope (sometimes incorrectly called an endoscope) over the winter to experiment with, and after playing with it I immediately got the idea to set it up to monitor the phoebe nesting shelf for the coming season, hopefully giving us undisruptive visual access to the nesting activities!  Mostly we wanted to be able to observe the fledges without disturbing them, and the borescope (a tiny USB-based video camera about the size of the eraser on a wooden pencil, mounted on a long flexible cable) seemed like the ideal tool to accomplish that at an extremely reasonable price (~$15 on Woot!).

First I configured a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B (a 3.4″ x 2.2″ $35 Linux computer about the size of a deck of cards that can run without keyboard or screen) to capture an image from the borescope once every five minutes and upload it over the internet to the BallotBox web site.  Then I set the “Pi” up on a small shelf between the joists in the Ballot Box basement, drilled a small 5/16ths inch hole in the sill by the phoebe shelf and snaked the borescope through the sill hole and out to the phoebe shelf. Finally I built a “NestCam” web page that displayed the current uploaded image, and refreshed itself every two minutes to display the newest image recently uploaded.  The borescope didn’t break the bank (remember, ~$15) so the resolution from dusk until dawn is anywhere from mediocre to non-existent, even though it does have LEDs encircling the camera lens (not InfraRed/NightVision, though). Don’t expect to see much at night!  Perhaps I’ll adjust the snapshot-saving to only occur during daylight… we’ll see.

And that’s how we came to host the NestCam!  Enjoy!!

BIRD SIGHTING UPDATE 20180305

Reference the SWALLOW HOUSE mentioned in the first paragraph above, we lost last year’s fledges to a predatory animal (likely a raccoon) who knocked the house off the post, ripped the bottom off the house, and decimated the nest inside, so during my last weekend up north I rebuilt and fortified the house (which is actually a bluebird house but the swallows always beat the bluebirds to it each spring).  Surprise surprise – just a week later (Lynn was up for the weekend with her sister but I was not) bluebirds have been spotted checking out the house!! We’ve still got snowbanks on the ground in places, but Spring is on it’s way!!!

No sign of the phoebes yet, but I keep checking the NestCam and live in hope!

BIRD SIGHTING UPDATE #2 20180506

Up at the Ballot Box this weekend, had at least three swallow pairs fighting over the two birdhouses (the one on the fence, and the one on the post on the far side of the leach field), saw hummingbirds so the nectar feeders got prepped and hung, and the phoebes are fluttering around the deck but haven’t found the Nestcam nest… yet!  Also heard a few pileated woodpeckers beating the crap out of trees in the woods.  Spring has arrived!

BIRD SIGHTING UPDATE #3 20180601

We had a prospective tenant checking out the digs recently… evidently didn’t like the color scheme since she didn’t move in.  Real Estate can be a cut-throat business!!