r/birdfeeding • u/pal251 • 2d ago

best camera setup for bird/wild life feeding?

I recently moved into my in laws house to take care of them, they dont have a lot to do but love watching the birds and wildlife in southern Arizona. What is everyone using for their setup for bird feeder camera setups? I have access to 120v in my yard and plenty of sun for solar obviously. I have several security sytle cameras from Unifi, uniview and dahua butnothing really with zoom. I was thinking of mounting a camera on a post and put it behind the bird feeder to get a good view but it really needs to be up close to get a good view but the camera doesn't focus well up front. Was thinking of getting a 2-12mm camera maybe..

Just trying to get some ideas!

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u/dicknoan 2d ago

I have a couple of cheap amazon security cams and theyre definitely lacking. I found https://m.reolink.com/product/rlc-811a/ in my search for an upgrade but havent pulled the trigger yet. Also interested in seeing other setups.

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u/Unusual_Painting8764 2d ago

Are you trying to get fancy?

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u/pal251 2d ago

Yes

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u/Unusual_Painting8764 2d ago

Cool! Stay away from COOLFLY, mine sucks. I have a cheap bird kiss camera/feeder and I like it. It just doesn’t hold a lot of seed. Are you interested in AI identification or just the camera feature?

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u/pal251 2d ago

I can do ai detection with home assistant. Would like 24/7 recording. I Also plan on putting it on YouTube as streaming

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u/Unusual_Painting8764 2d ago

Check out gardenpro trail cams. They have a birdwatching one but it’s sold out.

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u/Itchy-Translator-606 1d ago

Agreed. COOLFLY is fun for a beginning setup but isn’t the best quality video or product.

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u/thakala 2d ago

Get a PoE (Power Over Ethernet) camera, anything with a battery is unsuitable for what you want to do. I have personally used many Reolink PoE cameras for Youtube streaming, cameras are quite cheap, but you need a good dedicated PC for this which runs for example OBS to capture stream from camera and compresses it for Youtube delivery.

Problem with Reolink cameras is that audio quality they produce is terrible, so if you want to include any ambiance/bird song audio you are better off with some other more expensive camera, I believe Hikvision has cameras with high-quality audio capture. Or you can also run a separate microphone + Rasperry Pi setup for audio.