How many of us have wildlife cameras set up at home? This new technology gives a particularly helpful view for seeing our shyer garden visitors – set up to view 24 hour hours a day, images and videos can capture this hidden world.
Those of you who have set up your own trail cam will know that 24 hour monitoring will treat you with some rare delights. A visiting garden fox, the emergence of hedgehogs from your compost heap and squirrels cleverly leaping and balancing to visit the bird feeders – it also will give you a lot of images, as triggered by any movement!
MammalWeb was set up with this in mind, harnessing trail camera footage and images and creating a platform for ‘trappers’ who capture this footage, and ‘spotters’ who view and assess the contents with eagle eyes to detect the species within. Spotters vote on the species seen, giving verification weight to each other’s species level sightings, sorting the ‘unmistakeable, hedgehog’ from the ‘potentially trickier, yellow-necked mouse’– this helps us, local mammal groups, and county recorders, process these sightings as biological records quicker, leaving only the disputed identification to the experts.
