Let’s experiment with camera trapping!
Some months ago, I was very graciously loaned two full HD hunting cameras (aka trail cameras or remote cameras) by friend and colleague Rick Minter, specifically for use in Central Asian fieldwork (and if you want to know more about that, go here and here). For assorted practical reasons they were never used as planned. But in my keenness to use them – and ever hoping that I might catch a wayward British bigfoot or panther on camera – I recently installed one of them in the small area of overgrown, designed-for-wildlife space I own, and here we’re going to look at the results. Let’s do some camera-trapping in tiny little English suburbia.
The camera. I’ll say to start with that the camera – I’m hazy on its specifications but think it’s a Brown A280 with infrared motion sensor – is outstandingly good at its job and has performed exactly as I hoped. I initially had it on high sensitivity, but this resulted in hundreds of photos where it had been triggered by moving vegetation. I set it up to overlook part of one of our ponds. In that location, it isn’t really concealed but merely strapped to a metal post.
Caption: what sort of tetrapods might you expect to see in a small, suburban area in the south of England? These three are average, and even they are less abundant that you might like. Clockwise from left: Common frog Rana temporaria, Dunnock Prunella modularis, Eurasian blackbird Turdus merula. The blackbird is currently undergoing decline in the UK (by about 50% in some areas), apparently as a consequence of Usutu virus. Indeed, there are none living in our immediate vicinity this year… which is concerning. Images: Darren Naish.
The UK is unlike most other parts of the world. In discussing the sort of wildlife you might photograph with a remote camera in the UK, I feel the need to provide some background that might be necessary to readers overseas. To those of you outside the UK, I need to emphasize how little wildlife there is here, the south-east in particular.
The UK is – you have to believe me here – embarrassingly bereft of wildlife, and given this situation it’s simply unbelievable that successive governmental administrations have each brought in new plans to reduce what denuded little scraps of fauna and flora remain. Our current government has just (May 2025) announced a plan to allow development of infrastructure projects without public consultation at the pre-application stage, which basically means that companies can see a patch of land they want to develop and proceed without there being a need for people or organizations to raise objections. Remember that we humans massively benefit from the existence of green space: the argument that wild spaces are required isn’t ‘just’ about wildlife.
Caption: the green area in front of our house. It’s fringed by tall hedges and there are two ponds on the right. Image: Darren Naish.
When people say to me such things as “How many species of amphibians are there where you live?”, “Might snakes visit your pond to catch frogs?”, “Could shrews have eaten those half-eaten beetles you found?”, “Could it have been a wildcat or marten near your house?”, I’m both entertained and saddened by the naivety. One species of amphibian. No snakes. No shrews. No wildcats. No martens, no mustelids of any sort. And so on. I say it again: the UK is embarrassingly bereft of wildlife, such that the area where I live (Southampton in Hampshire) essentially has no more than a handful of species, and those species we do have are the hardiest survivors within their respective groups, the ones that occur right across Eurasia.
On that note, the area where the camera is set up is tiny, enclosed, fringed by suburbia, and literally right next to a busy main road. Here in suburban little England, it’s typical for houses to have small areas of land surrounding the house – sometimes both at the front and the back, if you’re lucky – that we term gardens. If you’re very lucky, or rich, a garden can be over 20 m (60 ft) long, but more average is something 6 m (20 ft) by 10 m (33 ft) or smaller, and that’s what we have. In the photos that follows, remember that we’re seeing a tiny, enclosed area: not the edge of a large area of farmland or forest. Oh, to live in such a place. I hate watching TV shows set in the USA or continental Europe because it seems to be portrayed as normal in those places that people live on vast plots of land, surrounded by countryside. The UK is not like that for average people.
Caption: it is standard practise here in the UK to completely strip areas around houses of all vegetation, cut down all trees, prevent the growth of grasses and so-called weeds, and to replace all of it with paving or concrete. I have gone against this trend and am keeping this area wild. Some people see it as a total mess, others as a haven for wildlife. I think it’s both. Image: Darren Naish.
Enough preamble, let’s get to the animal photos. I’ve deliberately kept them the same size and format as I find it entertaining to see the respective animals appear and disappear.
Carnivorans. The area where I live might be bereft of animals like mustelids or wildcats, but we do, famously, have a conspicuous number of urban and suburban Red fox Vulpes vulpes and we know from the noise they make and from occasional sightings that individuals often visit our garden. The first week of camera-trapping reveals that at least one Red fox is a regular visitor to our garden. As you can see, the animal (I’m assuming for now that it’s the same one individual) often visits the area of the pond, and seemingly drinks from it. Most of the photos were taken at night but there are a few from daylight. Here are a few of the better shots…
And then there are pet cats. In a small, overcrowded, overbuilt island nation with a small amount of declining wildlife, it should be obvious that free-roaming pet cats are an ever-present issue. It’s a very emotive one, to be sure. I feel – from decades of experience and observation – that pet cats are a massive problem for the health and persistence of wild animals, and I’ve gradually come to be annoyingly militant on this issue. I don’t think that cats should be out and roaming free at all, and I think that the damage they do to our handful of native reptiles and amphibians, to small mammals and birds, and even to arthropods (they’re good at killing butterflies, dragonflies and even crickets and grasshoppers), is self-evident and that letting your pet cat roam free outside is just not consistent with the claim that you care about wildlife (yes, I’m a cat owner, and yes my cats are indoor animals). I find that more and more people are coming round to this point of view and I no longer receive the total incredulity I used to when pushing this perspective.
Caption: we own two hilariously derpy cats, Mochi and Mocha, both looking quite grumpy on the left (Mocha is the one with the white ear spot). These are indoor cats who live happy, healthy lives in domestic surrounds. They’re placed on regular occasion inside a catio that basically resembles an aviary. We need to normalize the idea that pet cats should not be allowed to roam free outdoors. Images: Toni Naish; Darren Naish.
While I’m on this subject, pet dogs are a total disaster for beleaguered wildlife as well. It is extraordinarily depressing to visit places with the words ‘national park’ or ‘nature reserve’ in their name and see that people view them as dog playgrounds. Remember that dogs don’t necessarily need to kill or harass wildlife to cause problems; we know that the insecticides in dog shampoos and the de-worming agents expressed in their dung are ecologically damaging when dogs interact with the environment. But I digress.
Sure enough, a specific cat is revealed to be a regular visitor to the garden. It hangs around at the pond for extended lengths of time. It’s a black animal and hence a few of the photos are exciting as the first ones I got to see were mere glimpses of dark, curled tail and part of a hindlimb. Alas, that fluorescent collar is a bit of a giveaway. Look at the timestamps and note that the cat is standing in the same spot (lower two images) for over 20 minutes. This suggests that it’s stalking something.
Birds. We get a reasonable number of small passerines in the garden – Dunnock Prunella modularis, House sparrow Passer domesticus, Blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus, Wren Troglodytes troglodytes and European robin Erithacus rubecula, predominantly – and it would be nice if individuals of at least some of those species got caught on camera. But for week 1, only robin was obliging, since a lone individual visited the shallow end of the pond, either to forage (they will eat aquatic arthropods, tadpoles and small fishes) or to collect mud or moss for nest-building. Obviously, the camera – despite being HD – isn’t quite up to capturing small passerines in detail.
Caption: hopefully you can see the robin at centre left. This is a proper robin, of course, not a pretender thrush or anything weird like that. Images: Darren Naish.
Common wood pigeons Columba palumbus are ever-present here and appear to be doing fine in suburbia, and individuals were often caught by the camera, often around the edge of the pond and sometimes wading right out to the edge of the shallow area.
Also among larger birds, we have – in the past – had Eurasian magpies Pica pica nest in our garden (I wrote an article about this back in 2013), and it looks like this is happening again here in 2025, which is good. I’m a huge fan of corvids and don’t take them for granted.
Caption: what are likely the same pair of magpies have nested here on a few occasions, though I only know of one (in 2013) when they successfully fledged chicks. At left is one of the parents in 2013, and at right a montage of the two 2013 chicks. Of some relevance to the tone of my article here is that the several of the trees that these birds formerly used as vantage and resting places are now long gone because people in the suburbs sure do hate trees. I aim to start a ‘spite tree’ movement in response to this. Images: Darren Naish.
Magpies were captured on camera a few times in the first week, often at the pond’s edge. A very odd photo shows an individual flying at the top of frame with nesting material in its bill, and this bird also looks odd because it was lacking its long tail feathers when the photo was taken.
Carrion crows Corvus corone are sometimes seen in the area, and in 2017 one discovered the magpie’s nest and set about harassing these birds until they abandoned their efforts and chose to nest elsewhere. However, I didn’t know until seeing the photos below that at least one crow is currently in the habit of visiting the garden. That’s good news. In the images here, the camera captured the crow standing on the path and taking off too.
Smaller animals. A few cryptic small animals were captured by the camera too, but some imagination is required to work out what they are. You can see from the images (and the zoomed-in sequence) shown below that a small, dark animal with at least one large, reflective eye (I assume it had two) was photographed at the edge of the pond’s shallow end. If you look at the time stamps, you can see that it was in approximately the same location for about two hours.
I’m pretty sure that this animal is a frog, by which I mean the only frog (and only amphibian) here: Rana temporaria, the Common frog. They do, of course, leave the pond and move about the garden when foraging or looking for a new area in which to take refuge.
Finally…. numerous humans were caught by the camera but I’ve opted not to showcase those pictures here. Except for those showing this frequently present, sometimes nocturnal individual…
And thus, we come to an end of my first ever week of camera-trapping. I’ve got additional results since and will no doubt share results here again, but already I’ve essentially camera-trapped every species we can get in the garden. Really: that’s it. Oh, we have had rats and mice here before but none are in the area right now. This was a trial run to learn how the camera works and what it can do. The challenge next is to install it somewhere a bit more rural. If only such places existed nearby…
For previous articles on various of the animals mentioned here, see…
My local magpie family: four weeks of observation, 265 photos, and how good are the results?, June 2013
A Battle Among Blue Tits, February 2018
Birdwatching in Suburban China, May 2019
Tell Me Something Interesting About Dunnocks, July 2019
Surprising Diet of the House Sparrow, August 2022
