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Nature Counters from Gardenature
'Make your Nest Box count!' - Great in your garden or for more in depth conservation projects.
We've teamed up with our friends at Naturecounters to offer a truely innovative tool to help monitor not only bird box activity but a host of other wildlife too.
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The Nature Counter project was the brainchild of Dominic Goodwin, who continues the story in his own words.... "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."
A range of counters are now available which have been specially designed to fit onto the front of each of the Gardenature range of Bird Box Camera Systems. The counters can also be fitted to most standard nest boxes too.
Join the project and fit a Nest Box Counter to your bird box today!
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