I want to capture information about the moult sequence in male sparrowhawks during the breeding season by perhaps studying pictures from plucking posts around the nest where the male appears regularly throughout the breeding season. However, the pictures must capture the hawk while in flight and must have a sufficient image quality. Could even inexpensive trail cameras effectively capture an approaching hawk in flight?
All comments and thoughts are highly welcome.
This is an interesting question. So, presumably, the game/trail cameras would be aimed directly upwards to get a good short video of a flying raptor?
There has been an incredible advance in resolution and frame rate of the commercially available trail cameras? For a project we're setting up now, we looked into these units. One professional review stated that the videos are slightly overexposed, presumably because most of the the cameras are intended for use in slightly darker scenes (forest understory, etc.). This may not apply to all cameras, but it may prevent you from getting the necessary contrast between raptor and sky. Anyway, this is just one thing to think about.
Maybe they sell game cameras with adjustable exposure?
I did some tests with trail cameras for birds and results were not encouraging. There is a slight delay between triggering the motion sensor and capturing the image, and this applies even with very good trail cameras.
If your birds arrive always from the same direction, you could set the camera facing their flight path, so that you have the bird in view for the longest possible time. That way you might get some images where the bird is visible. However, the bird might be distant, too close or at a bad angle, and the images might not be of sufficient quality to see subtle details that you want to study.
It's possible to get much better quality images by automatic operation with CHDK software scripts (including motion detection) that can be run on a Canon compact camera. You can find info at: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK This is what I'm using - good but takes quite a lot of time and effort to get set up for a particular purpose.
However, if your study needs high resolution images of the flying bird with wings stretched out, from directly below, this is not something for trail cams or CHDK. You probably need a skilled photographer with a high quality digital SLR, operating from a hide.
Good luck with your study and please let us know how it goes.
Thank you all for your replies! I think the solution is to just try different methods to see how do-able this might be in field. Hopefully, the relatively inexpensive trail cameras could work, at least to a certain degree. Luckily, such camera systems are getting better and cheaper every year!
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