About

This site was created to follow the progress of a pair of Blue Tits, nesting in a specially constructed nesting box. The box is situated on the side of my garage on the outskirts of Edinburgh UK.

I started the site back in November 2002 when I put up my first nest box. Many friends, family and internet users where able to watch the first visits to the box and eventually the building of the nest. It was watched closely from that point when egg laying started, chicks hatched and finally the successful departure of all 9 chicks. Since then, we have had the Blue Tits nesting each year.

The Nest Box

This nesting box is made from treated timber. The entrance hole is 28mm which is ideal for Blue Tits. One section of the roof can be removed for cleaning at the end of each year. This box has a colour camera mounted high to the rear of the box. I cut a hole in the roof of this box to allow some light in during the day and it really improved the quality of the images.

Capture and Software

The BirdCam is a self built Athlon 1400xp based system running only the i-catcher software and Microsoft Frontpage for editing and uploading the web pages to my ISP.

My ISP is Nildram and is an ADSL 2mb connection with a static IP through a 4 port Netgear router to which I have 2 other PC's and a Laptop connected.

The domain "thebirdcam.co.uk" is hosted through 1&1

The capture card is a 4 port Osprey 100 from Viewcast

I decided to use software from i-catcher as this allowed me to set it up in Motion Detect mode so that when I was not around I would not miss any of the first visits as it would save the stills for me to view later.