Gill Rhodes, ICT technician at Hagbourne Primary School, explains some of the highs and lows of setting up their first bird box project.

This year Hagbourne Primary School have successfully set up their first bird box with a camera to enhance the learning experiences for pupils across many curriculum areas. 

A member of staff who was retiring gave us a bird box with a small black and white camera that fits into the top of the bird box. We placed it in a tree close to the school and set up the video lead from the camera to come directly into the school. 

The camera and bird box came as a kit.  The camera is connected via an analogue to digital converter straight to a school computer (we had to buy this separately). Basically this converts the video from the bird box into a digital signal that the computer can read. We used a Terratec Grabster AV250 MkII. This is available from Microdirect and other sources. (www.microdirect.co.uk )

We are broadcasting our video to the SEGfL website (address below). This allows you to capture short video clips and send them to pages on their web site and create an online diary of our bird box. The process for this was very easy - but our signal keeps disconnecting from their website. This was due to a problem with their server - which I think has not been fully sorted yet. I did record to a windows movie file for a 24hour period so we could capture some good videos of the eggs and got some great video shots which we have in our 'shared area' for the children to see. The next step is to try and broadcast to our own school website but I need more advice to get this working!

At the moment the video is going into an RM CC3 workstation, which is left on all the time but also used by pupils - this has caused a problem as the capture screen sometimes gets closed by accident. This week I am moving the ‘bird box’ to a dedicated computer.

Within a week of broadcasting we had a resident blue tit, with nesting material increasing day by day. We had a worrying moment in March when we had some very windy nights and the bird box was moving about a lot in the wind. The next day all the nesting material was gone from the bird box! Luckily this was short lived and a blue tit (we don't know if it was the same one or not!) was back to stay! A couple of weeks ago I thought I could see some eggs under lots of nest material - but it wasn't very clear. Now the nest has been tidied up by the blue tit and the eggs are easily visible. The children assure me there about 14 eggs in the nest!  Our wildlife expert thinks that’s too many for one bird and that 2 females could be using the one nest!

We have been warned that when the eggs hatch there will be casualties which will upset the children but the teachers are prepared and, after all, this is part of learning about life.

The children and staff all love watching the live bird box web cam and there has been great excitement throughout the school with the nest showing on every whiteboard!

If you would like any further help with starting such a project then please call Liz Hunt at Cricket Road on 01865 – 428034.

For those who would like to see Hagbourne’s project so far, try the following links:  Live video http://www.segfl.org.uk/birdbox/webcams/index.php?stream=10

The school’s page of saved videos and updates http://www.segfl.org.uk/birdbox/schools/index.php?school_id=10&viewall=1

Happy twitching

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