My Pond Cam

[Mike A.]

Set up a new pond cam using one of Andy's T5842T-ZE 4K cams.

If you enlarge and watch at the top center you'll see one of the resident frogs go up the waterfall after something and snatch it from the bush there. Then comes hopping back.




Still need to get the underwater lights set up better. Too bright for the cam settings as they work best otherwise. Need to get them backed some under the rocks and more diffused.

Outside lights I'm real happy with. Have a bunch of Hue stuff in the house already. Extended that outside with 2 Lily XL spotlights at a big tree next to the pond. One up-lighting the tree and the other down lighting the pond. Much better than the floods that I have on the house that I had to turn up too high making the yard way too bright. Have those tuned way down now and they only come on when a motion sensor kicks them on. Inside the pond there's a Hue outdoor lightstrip run around the near edge. iPhone pic below (which still makes things look much brighter than they really are).



And for comparison the ridiculously bright looking view of the same from the Color4K-X that I have watching the pond. Plenty of light for it. lol Lots of various wildlife coming through headed to the pond so works well for that now too.

 

[Mike A.]

Hmmm... I thought the forum would embed the YouTube video. How do I get that to show? Got it.

 

[TonyR]

Fantastic!
And very serene and relaxing. But I've had 2 cups of coffee already this fine morning and the sound of the bubbling pond water made me want to go pee.....

 

[Teken]

Fantastic!
And very serene and relaxing. But I've had 2 cups of coffee already this fine morning and the sound of the bubbling pond water made me want to go pee.....

 

[DanDenver]

Next up is a PTZ so you can better follow the adventures of the frog. Pretty cool setup.

 

[c hris527]

Very Nice setup, My neighbor has something similar, her fish keep getting eaten by some bird of prey or some other critters here, again very nice.

 

[Sybertiger]

Got some nice zen going there.

If I did something similar it'd fill up with water moccasins.

 

[SJGUSMC21]

Love your pond! I would have one here but the DAMN MOSQUITOS! Condo city for them.

 

[Mike A.]

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that in 20+ years of having it there that I've never seen any snakes. No water moccasins here but regularly see various water snakes at other bigger ponds/lakes nearby. Guess not enough food to keep them happy. Don't really miss them much.

 

[Mike A.]

Love your pond! I would have one here but the DAMN MOSQUITOS! Condo city for them.

Mosquitos don't really breed in the pond itself. Too much water movement and the fish take care of anything that wiggles like that. But still somewhat an issue since rain can pool a little under the rocks where the liner wraps under. We have hordes here anyway, not sure the incremental swarms make much difference. I'll crumple up some of the mosquito dunks (bacteria based, kills larvae) and sprinkle that around now and then to try to diminish them some.

 

[NielK]

Very Nice setup, My neighbor has something similar, her fish keep getting eaten by some bird of prey or some other critters here, again very nice.

We lost all of the 20-year old Koi carp that we inherited with the house. Turns out it was an otter - caught red-handed by a 5442.

Here's the evidence from a previous post: Any suggestions for night exposure settings to improve this fox capture?

 

[Mike A.]

Very Nice setup, My neighbor has something similar, her fish keep getting eaten by some bird of prey or some other critters here, again very nice.

Yeah, that happens. Every few years herons will come through and decimate the population. Smaller fish can get up in the rocks and other places to hide but the bigger ones are easy prey. All of mine are just feeder goldfish that get a reprieve but this was about a $500 koi that my neighbor gave me as a gift. Guy has $5,000 fish that he flys in from Japan.

View attachment HeronEatingFish1.mov

 

[TonyR]

Yeah, that happens. Every few years hernons will come through and decimate the population. Smaller fish can get up in the rocks and other places to hide but the bigger ones are easy prey. All of mine are just feeder goldfish that get a reprieve but this was about a $500 koi that my neighbor gave me as a gift. Guy has $5,000 fish that he flys in from Japan.

Perfect occasion to detect the heron with AI/DS or the like and blow a biga$$ air horn from 5 ft. away!
During the day only, of course....

 

[Mike A.]

AI might be the solution. I need a heron model. ; )

Tried a bunch of different things over the years... fishing line zig-zagged across which they don't like, motion activated sprinklers, etc. Some things work but they're more of an ongoing pain in the ass for me just to try to prevent a once every few years attack. Pretty much gave up. Fish are 5 for a $1. Easier to just replace them. Since I've had my cams I have been able to run them off more often when I see them starting to come around. They tend to be persistent little f'ers though.

 

[Keyboard]

That's a beautiful pond, and a very nice setup.

I always wondered how you keep predators from decimating a pond. It seems like a never ending battle.

I also noticed a frog performing an Olympic style dive into the pond.

 

[Mike A.]

Fox visitor. They'll usually go to the pond but seemed to be tracking something in the grass this time.




For comparison, this was when I first got the Color4K-X with it mounted higher and trying to use the onboard illumination. Not so great. That lasted about one night.




Another using the floodlights. Worked OK but made the yard way too bright. Didn't want that much light out there all the time.




So big improvement by moving the cam a little closer and the better lighting. Almost as bright as the floods for cam purposes without the stadium lighting for the whole yard. To the eye it looks a little less bright than the top image above.

 

[bigredfish]

Great job on the various lighting tests Mike. Really nice project, congrats.

 

[Mike A.]

Well, this is a strange one...

Found a dead robin the in the pond today so went to the video to see the how it got there. Thought maybe it had fallen out of the tree above or whatever. About the last thing that I expected to see was this...




At the top of the screen you'll see some robins happily splashing away taking a bath as they often do. If you enlarge and watch closely to the left side of the waterfall you'll see a frog moving closer. One of the robins gets too close to the edge of the water and then...

The frog attacks it?!? WTF???

Not going to post the rest of the bird struggling to get out of the water. Went on for a long time. Kind of surprised that it couldn't do it. Got to some of the wood that I have in there and crawled up but I guess it was too stressed at that point and didn't make it. I've found a few others at times over the years and never thought much about it. Now I'm wondering if the same happened to them.

 

[NielK]

More camera-based retro-investigations ... Found a pile of feathers by the side of the pond this morning. It was a sparrowhawk. Impact just off camera but you can see the Sparrowhawk streaking after a blackbird and then returning with its prey to dine in front of the camera. (Video trimmed and resized down.)

 

[Mike A.]

Good capture. Took me a while to figure out what the piles of feathers in the yard were from. Having cams around solves a lot of mysteries.