I need to analyze videos of hummingbirds visiting flowers and artificial feeders. I am interested in quantifying interactions as well as resource use, and thus, I need software that will allow me to measure time periods easily and even take some morphological measurements of flying hummingbirds.
Hi Gerardo,
I depends on your camera setup and the area being monitored, could you please provide more details?
I measured the inclination of the body axis of feeding hummingbirds with a protractor using the coordinate axes as a reference point. These measurements were conducted with the use of the free video analysis programme Tracker (http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/). In this setup I used a off-the shelf high-speed camera, see attached paper. Here is a link to the video: http://www.ardeola.org/files/Low-cost_high_speed_camera_to_monitor_hummingbirds_Ronny_Steen_Ardeola_60.1.mov
For general video monitoring, you could either use continuous video and post-process the video to automatically extract events of interest, e.g. http://benweinstein.weebly.com/motionmeerkat.html. Or you could use digital recorders with video motion detection (note: to capture the whole event pre-record will be needed, which a number of seconds before the trigger is kept along with the recording).
I do not think trail cameras will be suitable due to the sensor system (PIR) and trigger delay.
Regards,
Ronny
Ronny, thank you for the paper and the recommendations. I am plannig to buy a camera similar to the one you used in that publication, that records video close to 1000 fps. All the best, GA
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