THE BRITISH BIRDWATCHING FAIR IS THE WORLD'S FIRST AND LARGEST INTERNATIONAL BIRDWATCHING EVENT
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What are "Nestbox Counters"?
Nestbox Counters are electronic counters which you can buy and fit onto the front of almost all hole-fronted nestboxes. They have been specially developed to give an accurate measurement of the number of visits made to a nest. Nestbox Counters help you to learn much more about your wildlife than you ever could with just a nestbox camera. You can monitor the breeding patterns of birds, learn more about their behaviour, and measure how frequently they are finding food to bring back to the nest for their chicks, without any wiring or any intrusion into the box.
Nestbox Counters allow you to measure activity in a way that is almost impossible with just a nestbox camera, so they make the perfect complement to nestbox cameras for anyone who enjoys learning more about the wildlife around them. Being so much cheaper and more versatile than nestbox cameras, you can fit them to every hole-fronted nestbox and instantly see when birds are starting to visit the nestboxes without any drilling or wiring or connecting to a monitor.
Here is a little continuous loop of video, showing a Nestbox Counter fitted to the front of an RSPB nestbox going up from 64 to 67 visits.
You can fit our Nestbox Counters to a nestbox in a matter of seconds using the screws provided with nothing more than a screwdriver.
Our Nestbox Counters are powered by 2 AA batteries with a battery life of one year, and need no additional wiring. The Nestbox Counters use a dual light-beam detection circuit which allows them to detect partial entries, full entries, partial exits and full exits from the nestbox whilst a double-count-prevention algorithm is used for the times when a bird puts its head in and out of the box during one visit. The electronic circuit has a waterproof coating to protect it from rain and damp
Our Nestbox Counters cost 35 pounds including VAT, plus postage. While we are setting up our online shop, please use the contact form on the Contact page to order them.
The bigger picture - What is the "Nestbox Counters Project"?
At NatureCounters, we see our Nestbox Counters as part of a bigger picture. The Nestbox Counters Project is about the Environment, about Climate Change, about Conservation, and above all, it is a project about People.
The aims of the Nestbox Counters Project are:
To get people out into their gardens learning more about the wildlife around them, by plotting simple readings from Nestbox Counters throughout the year.
To provide a new and innovative revenue stream for environmental charities by selling Nestbox Counters, nestboxes, and other nature monitoring equipment.
To gather consistent and reliable records of nesting, breeding and provisioning habits of birds, bats, and other small mammals over a wide area and long period, as a basis for monitoring changing breeding patterns, through an international, online database.
We at NatureCounters are very proud to be the first people ever to develop and manufacture Nestbox Counters, and are expanding our range of products to provide counting Batboxes and Hedgehog boxes, as well as developing data loggers for detailed recording of visit times .
Nestbox Counters - A simple idea with big benefits...
As I walked through my garden a couple of years ago, I looked at the nestboxes and wondered, not for the first time, whether each one was occupied, but did not want to open them for fear of disturbing a sitting bird. Suddenly it occurred to me how useful it would be to fit a simple electronic counter to each one to show how often it was being visited.
I thought of Simon King’s Choughs in BBC’s Springwatch programme, and how fascinating it was to see how the visit frequency had changed with the weather. I realised that fitting a simple counter to thousands of boxes across the country, or even internationally, would form the basis for a survey of genuinely useful scientific data.
This would not just apply to birds, but to bats and land mammals too, so it could be a completely new way of reliably gathering common data on the effects of Climate Change across different types of animal.
I started to imagine my own children going out each day or each week and reading the counters, and learning how to plot graphs showing when animals visit their boxes, and uploading the counter values to a central database; a regular activity to keep children actively involved with the wildlife in their gardens, and, (thinking particularly of Climate Change), to make them aware how sensitive the animals are to their environments.
I then started to think about the commercial aspects, and realised that selling these counters might represent an exciting and totally new revenue stream for environmental groups and charities, and give them far more benefit than my individual donations ever could.
How many visits does it take to build a nest? How often are the parents bringing food to the chicks? How does the feeding pattern change with the weather? I believe I am the first person in the world to attempt to commercialise this simple but exciting idea.
This is such an exciting project! I hope you will want to be a part of it.
