Smile. You're on Candid Camera!

A few weeks ago, after a welcome period of relative calm up on the plots, there were a series of burglaries and break-ins to most of the sheds and stores on the allotments. Sheds are a usual target for ne'er-do-wells looking for power tools etc, that can be carried away easily and sold for, well, whatever they use the money to buy...

...my own shed must have been the last one they tried but they failed to get in. They had a go at forcing open the lock using another gardener's wooden 'dibber' but only managed to bend the steel plate I'd bolted in place and snap the dibber in half. There I found it, next to the door.

What worried me most was the proximity of the shed to the chickens. It would have been easy to grab a chicken or two for dinner (it was a Sunday after all!) Couple that incident with finding all my cockerels in the same compound, ripping the crap out of each other, on no less than three occasions over the past two weeks and you can appreciate the concern I have that someone might be interfering with my stock.

Now I can't sit there, rifle in hand, ghillie suited and covered in twigs, hiding in the bushes all day and all night up there can I? So what can I do?

Well I reckon I've found the answer to alleviating my paranoia and catching any potential felons to boot. Since a lot of you also have livestock of some sort or another (or like to covertly watch wildlife too) I thought I'd share my new bit of kit with you and see what you think.

The main problem faced by anyone wanting to have a cctv system outdoors I guess, is the need to have a power supply to the camera, some way of recording the footage / images, in a waterproof way and covertly so nobody knows your cctv camera is there (so it won't get nicked!).

If you have a field or an area well away from the house this can be a major problem. Plus, who wants to record onto tape or dvd 24/7? I've tried that at home and it's a pain in the arse.

Well my friends, this is the answer.

Front view of the Trail Camera, Wildlife Camera, Stealth Camera etc,...

Known typically as a 'Trail Camera' this design of digital camera was, I believe, developed by the military and used by snipers to track enemy troop movements through the bush. A huge success with hunters and wildlife observers too now, these trail cameras have become cheap enough that poor idiots like me can buy them from ebay off the shelf.

There are lots of brands and prices can range from under £100 to £500 and more but the basic design principle is the same. This one was £120.00 and included a free 8GB sd-ram card and delivery.

A 'Trail Cam' is basically a digital camera in a waterproof box that can shoot still images and/or digital video footage which is stored on a standard sd-ram card commonly found in digital cameras anyway. The camera runs on normal AA batteries and this is the great thing about these cameras. The camera is only triggered when something (or someone) passes in front of the IR sensors mounted under the camera lens (3 of them!) so the batteries can last a long, long time. This one can be set up to shoot a sequence of pictures or video once triggered and reset and go to sleep again after a specified period of inactivity.

Hidden amongst some garden 'debris'

In daylight the images or video is full colour at up to 640x480 pixels - big enough for sharp playback on a television. The still images can be shot at 5 megapixels or upto 12 megapixels which is not cutting edge these days but sharp enough.

At night the camera comes into it's own. Above the infrared sensors and the lens there is a block of IR led lights that light the immediate scene in front of the camera. The best bit is that this light is invisible so whomever or whatever is being filmed doesn't know it. The images are black and white at night but very clear (your Honour).

Dodgy geezer a.m....

Trail cameras have the facility to record the time of day, temprerature, even record the serial number of the camera (for multiple camera locations). The two colour images shown here were taken during low-light conditions and would be perfectly useable in court, ahem...

Dodgy geezer p.m. - performing a criminal dance.

I was made aware of these things by seeing them used by the BBC recently to record owls, otters and other shy wildlife with great success.

Tonight a friend of mine told me that councils have been using them for ages to record 'fly-tippers' in the act. Damn, I thought. Yesterday I had to stop the car and have a pee behind a bush next to a sign that said 'NO FLY TIPPING - CCTV IN OPERATION!' Seems I'll be famous after all LOL (yeah, yeah, no jokes about the high resolution needed to see my nob).

Inside the camera you can see who you've recorded taking a pee...

If you want to film the wildlife in your garden, land, tree it comes with a strap to fix it to a tree trunk or branch, a USB cable to download the images and footage straight to your computer and a power cord to link up to a bigger leisure battery for longevity. Oh and it can be used (let me read the box here) in temperatures from -22 to +158 F.

Brilliant!

I've had it strapped to a fence post all day and so far nothing.