Trail Cam Collective: From Generalists to Specialists

Whilst the majority of people tend to use trail cameras to monitor a wide variety of wildlife in their local area, Trail Cam Collective participants Jim and Agnieszka have used them for an interestingly niche project.

Jim and Agnieszka are experts at designing, creating and managing spaces for wildlife through their business, Wild Horizons. Since 2025, they have been working to stabilise and increase their local population of willow tits.

In this guest blog, Jim and Agnieszka talk us through the importance of saving this species and how camera traps have helped with their work.

Willow tit using a Wild Horizons specialist nest box.

The willow tit is a red listed species in the UK, and sadly the fastest declining resident bird in the country, with a 96% population decrease between 1967 and 2023.

The reasons for this trend have not been confirmed, though various factors have been suggested as potential contributors: habitat loss and fragmentation, competition from other tit species, and nest predation, especially by great spotted woodpeckers. 

Habitat management has been proposed as a conservation measure for willow tit but there is no solid evidence that it can be effective. In fact, certain practices, like coppicing and felling of trees or scrub clearance, might have negatively affected already dwindling populations.

The willow tit is a specialist songbird, very sedentary. It pairs for life and every spring pairs excavate a cavity in soft dead wood to build a nest in.

Wild Horizons for willow tits project, originating in Carmarthenshire, in Wales, where willow tits are still present in relatively good numbers, involves mapping the remaining populations, monitoring and studying the birds closely to determine the reasons for the species’ decline and applying immediate conservation measures to tackle this trend locally.

Many previously unknown occupied sites have been identified over the course of 2025 and 2026 and pairs have been monitored throughout the breeding seasons.

In suitable habitat, specialist nest boxes have been installed, which are designed to protect the breeding birds from predation by great spotted woodpecker and eviction by other tit species. 

In Carmarthenshire, where natural deadwood snags are still relatively abundant, it can be difficult to get willow tits to breed in the nest boxes. Therefore, an additional protection method has been developed for the nests in natural cavities - a protective mesh guard, which has been applied over the last two years with great results.

After trialling a trail camera at a willow tit nest site in 2025, a larger number of trail cameras was incorporated in the 2026 breeding season into the Wild Horizons' monitoring programme with great help from NatureSpy, Welsh Ornithological Society, Birds on the Brink and a number of private donors.

The cameras proved an invaluable tool that provided an incredible insight into the lives of willow tits and the challenges that they face - predation of nests by great spotted woodpecker has been proven to be a major problem, the effectiveness of installed protection was confirmed, whilst interactions between willow tits and other tit species have also been observed and studied during the breeding season.

There has not only been pleasure in observing the ins and outs of willow tits’ lives through the trail camera lens, but most importantly a major conservation breakthrough.

Whilst the cameras are invaluable to the willow tit research and really help us to understand how best to actively protect willow tit nests from predation with our groundbreaking mesh guards, their use offers various opportunities to anyone interested in nature and wildlife.

Our work, for example, inspired our daughter to observe the wildlife on our doorstep with the use of trail cameras. She explored how badgers use the paths around the property and what foxes have for breakfast!

Thank you to Jim and Agnieszka for their insights into the importance of saving willow tits in the UK and the subsequent benefits of using trail cameras. If you’d like to find out more about how you can use trail cameras in your local area, head to our Trail Cam Collective page.