Because most garden mammals are nocturnal, it’s difficult to know if they visit your garden. However, by installing a mammal trap camera, you can capture the antics of anything from hedgehogs and field mice to foxes and even badgers, while you sleep.
In this No Fuss video guide, Kate Bradbury explains how to set up a mammal trap camera and how it works.
More advice on wildlife gardening:
- Garden wildlife identifier: small mammals
- 10 ways to help garden wildlife in autumn
- How to help hedgehogs
How to set a mammal trap camera: transcript
Not all of us know which wildlife visits our gardens at night. There’s lots of ways to find out, but one of the easiest ways is to use a mammal trap camera. Something like this is really easy to set up. It’s fully waterproof, so you can put it in place and then forget about it until you want to watch the footage. It’s really easy to use. When you you open it up, it’s battery operated, so there’s no wires going anywhere; and there’s a really simple menu here, which you can set to take still photographs or film.
There’s actually a setting in this model where you can film both at the same time. If you’re making video clips, you can set the length of video clips you want. And this is all triggered by movement in front of the camera.
Really good examples to use for this are, if you wanted to set up a feeding station, like a badger feeding station or a hedgehog feeding station, you just position the camera over there to capture the activity in front and see what’s going on. And this model also works in the day. So you could set it on for continual filming in front of, say, your bird feeding station and capture the antics of the birds visiting your garden. So, once you’ve played with all the settings and worked out exactly what you want, obviously follow the instruction manual here, close it off. Make sure it’s fully closed here, so that no water can get into the mechanics of the camera and then use this to attach it to a tree or something similar.