Monitoring a peregrine falcon family with camera traps

Camera traps are well designed for monitoring mammals, but they can also be setup effectively to monitor birds nests, providing non-invasive monitoring over a breeding season.

In this article, the team at Eagle Reintroduction Wales share insights from their fascinating work studying peregrine falcon nests on cliffs in Wales. Quite unlike any other project we've worked ever worked with at NatureSpy, these camera setups involve abseiling and unique challenges including bird poo on camera lenses!.. 

Eagle Reintroduction Wales are working towards reintroducing golden eagles and white-tailed eagles back into their historic ranges in the Welsh landscape. These two iconic species have been absent from Wales for over 150 years, so the groundwork for this project involves the study of peregrine falcons - an ecologically similar species - to assess if the landscape is currently suitable for breeding eagles.

Camera trap monitoring of peregrine falcon nests is helping the team at ERW to observe nesting success and gain insights into factors such as diet. This monitoring requires careful planning and unique camera trap setups that are left for months at a time through the breeding season. In this article, Sophie-lee Williams (Project Manager at ERW) and Jimmi Hill (founder of Raptor Aid) talk us through the unique process and challenges of setting up these camera traps and how this footage is being used in peregrine falcon conservation.  

A camera trap keeps an eye on peregrine falcon chicks

What are you hoping to learn from monitoring the peregrine nests this year?

Sophie-lee - Our peregrine nest cams have been back in the field keeping an eagle eye on our feathery friends. This year we have partnered up with urban peregrine expert Ed Drewitt at Bristol University to gain insight into the diet of our upland peregrines. These peregrine sites are part of a study area which has been continuous for 40 years and over this period a severe decline in breeding pairs has been observed, which is thought to be down to a lack of prey availability. Our peregrine nest cams provide a non-invasive way to keep an eye on these elusive breeders in the remotest parts of North Wales.

Keeping watch over peregrine falcon eggs

How do you set up a camera trap on a cliff?

Jimmi - Even though peregrine falcons show strong site fidelity to a quarry or cliff, it may contain several ledges which can be used for breeding and laying eggs. Each year the team monitoring this population carries out observations to understand which ledge is likely to be used by the female to lay her eggs. Once this is figured out, the climbing team abseils into the ledge to set up the camera to measure the full breeding cycle including the male provisioning the female to the eggs hatching and chicks successfully fledging. On these ledges, the easiest way of attaching a camera is by fitting a metal bracket using 3 screws and rawl plugs (pretty much the same as putting shelves up in your own house) onto the cliff face adjacent to the nesting ledge. We have found that brackets made from metal survive harsh weather meaning that once fitted they can remain in place for several seasons.

Another thing to consider is the direction of the sun when deciding where to position the bracket. Ideally, we try and have the position of the camera far enough back to not disturb the birds but also catch moments such as the male arriving with food and the chicks getting bigger when they start moving about the ledge with food. We also position the camera slightly higher than the scrape where the eggs/chicks are to avoid any interference from growing chicks or arriving adults. The camera is pointed slightly downwards to avoid rain impacting any images/footage.

A trail camera keeps watch over a peregrine nest

What camera settings do you use and why?

Jimmi - During the first season of the study, we set the cameras to trigger every time movement was detected. We didn't want the cameras to capture images during darkness when activity is limited, so we prevented the cameras activating by setting the camera timer to deactivate an hour after sunset and reactivate an hour before sunrise. With Ed Drewitt’s advice and involvement, he recommended from his experience that video footage was better than photos for identifying prey items, so we switched to 5-second long video clips for 2022. One thing we are super impressed with is how good the battery and memory card capacity is on the Browning camera traps we are using - we have had cameras out for over 6 months and still recording.

Peregrine falcon nest

What kind of challenges do you come across with these camera setups?

Jimmi - This year one of the pairs of peregrines decided to use an old raven nest on the cliff to lay their eggs. The raven nest is in a very small hole within the cliff, and this meant there was very little room for setting up the camera and gave us a very narrow field of view. Whilst we got some great clips of the chicks hatching and developing, eventually they got pretty good at aiming their poop and treating the camera lens as a bull's eye.

What happens next with the data from the cameras?

Sophie-lee - Picture and video footage from this season will be analysed to assess what prey items are brought to peregrine nests in upland habitats. A detailed profile of the prey species brought to each peregrine nest will be gathered from the nest cams and quantified to assess diet composition over the season. These assessments are crucial to understanding what prey is readily available for this rare upland breeder in Wales. Our results will be directly compared to the diet of urban peregrines to try and understand if prey availability is the reason why we are seeing declines in peregrine breeding in uplands habitats and increases in urban habitats.

Thank you to Sophie-lee and Jimmi for sharing these fascinating insights from their peregrine falcon conservation work. Learn more about Eagle Reintroduction Wales on our Project Pages.