Small POE (power-over-ethernet) cameras suitable for nest boxes

Nature Talk
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I’ve finally decided that I’m going to put together a screech owl nest box to put in my yard. Had a screech owl show up on my security cameras a few days ago, and one woke me up the other night calling, so I want to encourage their presence.

I’d like to put a camera inside the box so I can spy on the occupants, as well as keep track of when it’s a good time to climb a ladder and clean out the box.

It baffles me that there are so many nest box cams, yet tracking down good cameras is way less straightforward. Looking at clickbaity “5 best” articles usually turns up links to products that are no longer available.

The ONE product I’ve managed to track down that appears to have the sort of form factor I want (and is actually available) is this one:
IP Bird Box Camera - Green Backyard (green-backyard.com)

I’ve tried looking up other little cameras that are for home security and whatnot, and just not tracking down what I want. Obviously, it needs a small form factor and the ability to focus on things pretty nearby, but also stuff like infrared capability, a microphone, and a mounting bracket is super handy. The ability to run as a live stream would be cool, but I won’t be doing that right now. Right now, all I want to do is for the camera to activate on motion detection and then save to the computer. Bonus points if it can record to a network-connected hard drive (I have one for the security cameras around the house).

I’m NOT interested in wireless. I have to run wire for power as it is, so I might as well go POE and get power and data through the same cable. This thing will be mounted far enough from the house that I’m concerned about wifi signal strength/reliability. I will also be building the nest box around the camera - probably using the false roof method. The less I have to fuss with it, the better, since this thing will be getting mounted ~20ft up into a tree. So, no SD card bs.

Does anyone know of any other cameras that work well for this sort of thing?

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anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

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I ended up ordering this one from the same vendor.

Outdoor PoE Wired IP Bird Box Camera - Green Backyard (green-backyard.com)

Wider FOV (better for larger box?), and higher resolution being the reasons. Once it arrives, I’ll be able to assemble the box around it, ensuring that I increase the dimensions to suitably fit it. Considering a false lid so the occupants don’t have access to any edges of the camera, or the wire, or any of that.

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I’ll be interested to hear what you think about it, after you’ve had time to tinker and test. :)

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I’ll be sure to update this thread. I’ll be able to fiddle with the camera more or less right of way, so I’ll be able to report back with those impressions.

one thing I’m not clear about, and will require some testing, is if I can get the camera to store footage on a hard drive that’s connected directly to my router, without requiring my computer to be running all the time. I’m hoping that it WILL do that. getting the box built and installed in a good spot will take awhile. mostly the installed part. I want to get the placement dialed to minimize squirrel and other issues.

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The camera arrived a couple days ago and I’ve been playing with it.

Camera quality seems pretty good. Image quality is very good. The IR LEDs are definitely no-glow. However, the camera makes the occasional click noise as it operates. Seems like it does that when it switches from color daylight to night mode, but I haven’t figured out all of the reasons why it might. I hope this doesn’t prove to be too disturbing to box occupants.

The software the manufacturer includes sucks. Bad translations to English make some of the options a pain to figure out. The option to add a camera over a wired connection was buried under menus on the phone app, and that made things unnecessarily difficult.

The phone app doesn’t appear to allow you to store video clips onto network accessible storage, which is a disappointment. It looks like the only option is to use your phone’s storage (built-in or memory card).

The computer program the manufacturer supplies is worse. Terrible. I found a program from a 3rd party called Security Eye which appears MUCH better. The free version has nag screens and limited functionality, but it’ll probably be fine for me for awhile.

I think in the future, once I’m getting regular occupants, I’ll probably buy a network video recorder (NVR) so I can just automatically save the clips from the camera without needing to interact with my phone or leaving the desktop computer running constantly.

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So far so good.

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In case anyone cares, I got the camera wired up and running today.

I got a 100ft length of outdoor direct-burial-rated cat6 ethernet cable and routed it to a utility box on the side of the house where the cable tv would enter (if the cable company had ever cared to serve the neighborhood), put a hole all the way through, and installed a low voltage box, ethernet outlet, and cover plate inside.

spent most of my time fiddling with cutting a length of indoor cable to the length I need to get it to my router.

I’ll be burying the cable outside and otherwise tidying up once it warms back up after the big snow that’s falling this weekend. it also appears that the camera moved at some point after my last test images, so I need to climb back up the ladder and center the image. right about now, I’m pretty happy that I hinged the roof and made it easy to get in there to service the camera.

I’ll be anxiously awaiting activity alerts on my phone when the local wildlife comes to investigate this box.

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Hi @naturalist_nate I read your post from 2021 with interest. I’m looking to do the same thing - build a nest box for a western screech owl and put a nest box cam inside. Now that you’ve had yours installed for a couple of years, how is it working? Any recommendations you might want to pass along? Thank you, Caroline

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Welcome to the iNat forum!
I reopened the thread and moved your post here to keep all the discussion together.

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It works reasonably well. I guess I never updated the thread with the streaming link, but you can find the livestream here:

Smorgasbird the Owl - YouTube

Most of my comments about it have little to do with the camera itself. The box works great and the way I’ve installed the camera is pretty excellent, too, except for spider webs that build up in the summertime (my local owls are not nesting in my box, but use it for food caching and roosting during wintertime).

The camera itself works well enough. The app that operates it is a pain, though. Can’t figure out how to change the time zone on the camera, but the app will at least sync the time with my phone. I wish the motion detection notifications worked a little better, but they go off for every little thing so I just disabled them entirely.

Running the ethernet cable for power and data took some thought, but I found a spot on the house that worked to get the cable out, and then I buried everything in electrical pvc conduit out to the tree where the box is located, and then most of the way up to the entry point in the box.

Most of my issues are related to the process of putting together a livestream for youtube. I use the OBS software on a dedicated all-in-one PC that I got for cheap as a refurb. The computer is a little underpowered for the purpose. It does okay, but I had to fiddle with settings to dial it back a bit to get it to be a little more reliable. Still, the software freezes on occasion and I have to restart the stream. I don’t know exactly what causes the software to freeze up, as it doesn’t give me any details, but the processor use is pretty low. I use a 2TB external hard drive as my “DVR” drive. It lasts for awhile before I have to review and clear off old content.

So far, I’ve really only run the livestream during the months when the owl(s) visit the box. So far the start using it in about late Nov and then stay somewhere else starting in about March or April. After that, I stop livestreaming, but I’m still recording footage.

I use an old version of Sony Vegas software to do editing for sharing on the channel, and that software lives on my desktop computer. It definitely wouldn’t run on the computer I use for the livestream.

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Thank you for the response! I checked out your videos - very cool. I appreciate the technical detail and the info on the connections. As a complete newbie to wildlife cams streaming to Youtube is probably too challenging for a start. I think I’ll do a simple exterior cam for this first season to see what kind of traffic I get.

I’m in the west, and according to my reading Western Screech Owls don’t take to nest boxes as easily as Eastern. There are only a couple of WSO sightings recorded in my area, and one Saw Whet. Lots of Great Horned.

My box looks like yours. I plan to put it at about 11 or 12’, within the outer branches of a maple tree (shade, privacy).

If I do get tenants then maybe I’ll try for an interior cam set up with a small solar panel / battery combo.

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Getting the youtube streaming up isn’t technically hard but you do need to do some work.

Still, my box was up for a year before I set that up. It took a year before the local wildlife really gave it attention. I’m sure it got used a little before that, but I never really noticed it.

What I will say is that you should figure out some way at least to store footage. I chose a camera that did not have any internal storage on it. Getting a camera with internal storage would be an easy solution to the problem. Since mine lacks that, I needed to set something up and I didn’t think that was important at first. But since that first year had little attention, what attention it did get was fleeting. Meaning, even though the app gives motion notifications, by the time I checked a notification, there would be nothing in the box. Now that everything records, I don’t need to jump at notifications (only to be skunked), and I can scroll through old footage at my leisure.

I’m not sure how WSO site selection works, but your site description probably wouldn’t work for easterns. My box is a similar height, maybe a touch higher, on the trunk, and below any branches on an oak. AFAIK, this is generally recommended to minimize predator issues. I may still need to figure out some kind of predator shield because I’ve got no shortage of predators stopping by.

I made another box for a friend who lives about 2mi away from me, and he has gray squirrels as permanent residents. I knew this was a chance for mine, but I hear owl calls with some regularity, so I hoped they’d use my box.

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Good point about the storage. I’m looking at Campark cameras after spending some time researching last night. With a solar panel/battery so I don’t have to run power. That’s for my first season exterior cam.

I will rethink the location based on your comments. Unfortunately I don’t have any trees with tall branchless trunks around my house. There’s a power pole, but I’m sure the utility would not appreciate the box, plus it’s a squirrel/racoon highway. I am also looking into predator shields. Maybe I’ll have to go into the ‘field’, there is a ranch close by that might let me put one up.

I appreciate your thoughts and experience with this.

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my alternative if one of the trees didn’t work was to just set up my own tall pole. I’ll probably wind up doing that for a bat box in another part of my yard anyway.

One thing to look for is if your camera has onboard storage, make sure that whatever way you have to access it allows you to clear that onboard storage if necessary. the last thing you want to be doing is needing to climb up there on a tall ladder to clear it out.

I ended up with what I did for a few reasons, and it ended up being the combination of all those things that pushed me into the camera I used. I wasn’t really finding much with all of the features I needed.

Primary concern was how I was going to handle power AND data transfer. I’d have been willing to do wifi data transfer (my tree is close enough to my router that it would work), but power was the secondary concern. Could have done solar with a battery, but I have enough tree cover that the amount of recharge capacity I’d have was in question. Further, a SMALL camera that’d fit easily enough into a box was a priority, of course. And on top of that, I really wanted to prioritize no-glow or as-little-glow-as-possible IR so the camera would disturb occupants at night as little as possible. it’s really hard to assess the glow of IR lights, as I’ve read that birds can see into the IR spectrum a bit, so they’ll see stuff we don’t.

so, I ended up choosing power-over-ethernet so I could have stable data transfer and power over the same cable. if I needed to run a cable for power, then I might as well use it for data, too.

Which campark camera(s) have your interest. I was looking at their website (I had not encountered them before) and I wasn’t seeing everything I think would be useful in one package. Their solar trail cameras, for example, are going to be too big to put inside an owl box. They’ve got that little bird box cam that’d work, but I’m not clear if they have any solar panels that can power it. wifi data transfer is going to have fairly short range.

Now, I have Arlo cameras around the house for security cameras and to capture video of the bears, deer, turkeys, and so on that visit. Those work well for their purpose (they are wifi and I charge them with solar), but they’re kinda chunky. I suppose you could make a nest box that’d fit them, but the other question is whether they have the short focal distance necessary for a nest box camera. I’m not sure that they do.

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The Campark cam would be mounted away from the nest, with a view of the entrance. I need to get the nest box mounted asap and I’m afraid it’ll take me too long to figure out a the nest box cam set up. So for this first season I’ll go with something outside the box. Considering the TC22. My head is spinning with all the variables to take into account. I’m going to check out the Arlo cams too.

Biggest decision is still where to mount it. I’ve been researching on the internet, and the recommended height seems to be 10’ to 30’ which is quite the range. Most sources mention 10 to 12’. We could do our own pole, that’s an option that requires a bit more work. It gets hot here, though I believe the chicks will be fledged by June, before the big heat hits, so maybe shade is not a worry. Good point about the accessibility of the camera for changing out the SD card.

I heard a western screech owl the other night - deep in the neighborhood, so that is a good sign as I live in a suburban environment. Close to parks and wild land along a river but humans, cars, racoons and rats are part of the surrounding scene. That’s another reason for the outside camera - to see if predators are going to be a problem.

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I wouldn’t bother trying to rush the camera out right now. it’s probably too late in the season for any local owls to be considering using it for a nest. it will take them awhile to find it regardless of when you put it up, so whenever you put it up, I wouldn’t expect it to get extensive use for quite some time. if western screech owls are anything like easterns, once they have a nest site, they’re going to continue using it until they cannot anymore, or unless they die and new owls move in. the owls in my area likely have a nest site already, so my box is a roost site only for now.

put the box out when it’s all ready, and you can ensure you’ve got the siting and orientation figured out. I recommend if you’re considering a camera for the interior, take care of that before you put the box up because that’ll be the toughest to add later. and it’s totally fine if you choose a camera you don’t have all the setup figured out for when you put up the box. as long as the camera is in the box, you can probably figure out how to get the power to it and the footage from it later on. it took me awhile to get all the wiring on mine done after I put up the box. and then awhile more to get the software side figured out just to be able to look in on it occasionally.

in my case, I built the box around a specific camera. I can put up an exterior camera at my leisure. I’ve got a handy spot to put one (on a corner of my house at close to the same height above ground as the owl box - that corner is on a screen room on my deck that didn’t exist when I put the owl box up) but I need to make sure I find a camera that can zoom so I can frame the image suitably.

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Yeah, I think rushing it out now is probably not the right move. I just heard a WSO again this evening, quite close. So it’s hard not to put up the box, but after thinking about it some more I think I will focus on the nest box cam instead of doing an exterior cam.

This conversation and my research has led me to some parameters for my purposes. Nestbox cam must be:
• Small, weatherproof
• Wifi enabled, check app requirements
• Rechargeable batteries to plug into remote PV panel via USB port
• SD card slot (128 MB min), accessible
• Loop recording
• Night vision with non-intrusive light
• Check noise levels

I’ll do some more research to see what I can find to fit. I will report out. Thank you for all the helpful input.