This is kind of a follow-up on my post about one of our bird houses becoming a ‘smart home’ last year… well it wasn’t really a smart home, just a bird box with a weather station on top of it. But it looked kind of cool and a pair of blue tits didn’t care about the whirling parts above them.

This spring my kids and I decided to build a bird box with a built-in live camera. A real (hehe) smart home for birds.

We used an ESP32-Cam for the build – probably the fastest way to get our bird box working without too much soldering or programming (source: ESP32-Cam GitHub repository). We also installed a 5 W solar panel on top of it and added a Waveshare solar power manager to keep the ESP32-Cam up and running over night. The whole build was pretty much pieced together and we still have to improve a few things in our design. But hey, it works, at least when the sun shines.

At first, nothing happend…

Weeks passed, and from all the bird boxes we had only one appeared to be unoccupied – guess which one… (yes, the one with the camera.) We were busy with other tasks and had no time to take care of the bird box. Can you image how surprised we were when we noticed a great tit that kept flying into the box.

When we turned the camera on, we could immediately see 8 eggs in the box and a few moments later one of the birds returned to warm the nest. Really a wonderful surprise.

So now we are waiting for the little ones to hatch…

Update: One week later…

After one week the chicks have hatched and their parents are pretty busy feeding them… We’ve counted 6 chicks.

Update: Two weeks later…

The chicks are growing, we can see the first signs of their plummage. There seem to be 3 chicks left.

The parent birds also keep the nest clean by taking the taking the droppings with them…