Hi Emmanuel

Small carnivore behaviour is a specialist and challenging application where nobody has done much camera trapping - the big markets are deer hunters in the USA and researcher want still pictures to do population estimates. There are some papers from Australia and New Zealand, and recent papers on interspecific scent marking, in Santa Cruz, Panama and Botswana that I can send you if you have not seen them already.

I have done some small carnivore camera trapping with mixed results. In my experience the most important feature is trigger speed - at ranges where the image of a small carnivore is a sensible size; out to about 5 or 6 m from the camera, a 1 s trigger delay, added to PIR sensitivity being lower at the edges of the detection zone means that videos begin with the animals already leaving the field of view. Fortunately faster triggers (0.5s) are now standard. If you want to record behaviour that goes on for a while you need long videos (with the disadvantage that they chew memory and take along time to review) and a fast recovery between videos or sod's law will determine that the camera will miss the critical bit !.

Among older cameras Bushnell Trophycams struggle with detection when it is hot, and the video quality is marginal. Stealthcams are way too slow.

Reconyx Ultrafires produce very good videos for a very high price, and have a slow response and recovery. Spypoint 11Ds, at abut 1/3 the price of the Reconyx have very fast triggers and recovery, but their video is not as good. Browning have three new models out that look interesting. Their Strike Force Elite HD is mid range with mid range perfomance but seemed to have a dead spot about 5m out.

Putting it diplomatically; the two review sites you link are not as objective as could be wished.The most reliable reviews are those of TrailcamPro's site; http://www.trailcampro.com/, but even they too are in the business of selling trail cameras, so they tend to look on the bright side.

There is a sudden explosion of mid-range camera traps like the on you are considering. It is likely that they are being produced by the same Chinese manufacturers as make the established brands, so in principal there is no reason why they will not work as well as the established brands. What I do notice is that the price on Amazon is about the same as for Bushnell's, Brownings and Spypoints with similar performance, so you are not saving money by going for a new brand.

They quote a very long detection range, but they could have achieved it with a nice cold background and a large target like a human. It is not relevant to recording small carnivores against a hot African background, - I have seen a family of Selous mongoose playing for 5 min or so 4 m from a Bushnell Trophycam (the old model) in the early evening with not a single image captured !! At 20 m a small carnivore will be a tiny speck anyway, especially with the 90 degree field of view. Unless there is autoexposure control, very bright IR lights are actually a drawback for small targets close up because all you get is burned out images. 

Price and performance specifications are not good predictors of actual performance in the field - you really need to try out an actual camera, but that gets very expensive very quickly. It would be encouraging if the suppliers had enough faith in their products to make them available for testing for research applications.

Will you use the camera traps at bait stations or along trails? How small are your target species?

Hi Ronny

We set our cameras at latrine sites. The target animals weigh 0.5 to 2 kg and have a body length (without tail) of 30-50 cm.

Cheers

Emmanuel

In my own work I have mostly used high-end trail cameras such as Reconyx. Although I have also used the poor man's version of Reconyx, namly Browning, model Dark Ops HD, at badger and woodchucks dens. I must say that the Browning performed well in terms of durability and video quality. You could read more about it here (e.g. trigger speed and quality): https://www.trailcampro.com/products/browning-dark-ops-940-hd)