Definitely do-able. I've done it. But your budget might be a bit tight. I've learnt a lot from having 3 cameras in a local church tower to now having 12 cameras, it's been quite a learning curve. I'll ask a few questions - and then outline a few of my own learnings - have a read through - and let me know if you have any more questions.
- Do you have a purpose built owl box within the loft?
- If not, do you know the exact point in the loft where the owls are likely to lay?
- What's the approximate length/width/height of the space?
- Do you know the owls access point?
- Do you have access to power near the loft? (It's likely you don't have power in the loft itself).
- Do you know what kind of owls they are?
- Owls are not as big as people sometimes imagine - and if they happen to be barn owls - they'll be very light in colour and tend to reflect infra red light and glow in the blackness of a loft which can cause challenges for exposure.
- Owls spend a lot of time sleeping, away from the nest and hidden in corners - so although a livestream is great, it's also useful to have a recording facility so you can grab some of the interesting videos to share with your local community as you might have hours of 'nothing happening' on your streams.
- You've mentioned you have a good internet connection - the key thing isn't the download speed that everyone focuses on - but the upload speed. We had a download speed of 50mbps - but the upload varied a lot - and sometimes dropped as low as 1/2mbps. We've just upgraded the internet today, and are now getting upload speeds of 10-12mbps - still not amazing - but enough for the youtube stream.
I have to say owls being owls - they don't always follow the pattern of behaviour they have in the past - ours loved to sit on the church bell, so we had a camera pointing at the bell. Then he decided to sit somewhere else where the camera wasn't pointing.
We also fitted one camera in the owlbox, and the owls managed to lay their eggs just out of view, even though we could see 80 percent of the box. (Now we have two cameras in the box and 100 percent coverage).
I started in the first year with a budget of £500 and didn't really know what I was doing - probably a bit like you, had a fairly technical mind, but didn't really know a network switch from a POE switch.
I found over the first year after installation, posting videos to the local facebook group really pulled in a cult following, but really got traction when eggs were laid, and then in the second year I set up a crowdfund campaign (it's just a small village) and raised £500 for a monitor in the church so people visiting could see the owls 'upstairs' from downstairs. I also had someone come forward to add another anonymous donation of £800 towards equipment, so we bought the dedicated network video recorder, a new PTZ and the youtube streamer. The advantage of using a decent PTZ with the video recorder is that you can set certain events to move the camera - so when the owl lands on the right hand side of the owl box - the camera automatically zooms in on that spot.
I also found that owls like perches and sticks where they can see the entrance/exit. I fitted a couple of sticks on the walls and pointed cameras at them, and the owls soon started landing on them, sometimes sitting there for a few hours at a time. The recent addition was a perch on the owlbox, as they were gripping the edge, and although they were good at it - the perch separates them slightly from the box and gives us a better image.
If you want to see where I'm up to now - you can see our livestream here:
Owls in the Tower
A couple of screen grabs from earlier:
The start of the project:
1 x camera looking at the bell - £150 (We chose a budget Hikvision PTZ for this so that we could look around the tower, and zoom in on the owls)
1 x camera in the owl box - £100 (A miniature camera about 1 x 1 x 1 inch powered by POE)
1 x camera looking at the owlbox (A second hand donated fixed turret Hikvision camera)
1 x POE switch- £50
Network cables/tools/plugs - these cameras are at the top of a church tower with no power - so I ran a network cable from the groundfloor for each camera feed - used a 305m box of cable plust plugs/socks/tools - about 30m of cable for each camera run - probably about a £100 all-in
I was fitting cameras to the church grounds and foodbank at the same time so there were a couple of things that sort of interlinked between both projects.
I set up RTSP streams with 'rtsp.me' (that's a website) which on their 'free' package' meant I could give the fb groups three links to the cameras - but you couldn't watch more than one link at a time without paying fees. They then started charging anyway based on views - and so although it wasn't a daft price - it soon became apparent that if we kept paying them every month for the next couple of years, we'd be better off getting a Youtube streaming device, that once we had it, wouldn't cost a penny to run aside from the electric to run it. The other advantage of Youtube for the end user is that you can 'rewind' as it has a built in record function, so you can see what happened up to about 12 hours ago. It's not perfect - it seems to keep losing 'chunks' of time - but in general it's nice to be able to go back and see what happened before you woke up.
Initially I ran the first owl cameras to the existing video recorder via a POE switch, so that we could record the activity as well as view it. This allowed me to download clips whenever anything interesting was spotted, and shared it to the local facebook residents groups.
Initially interest was limited to a few comments and likes, but when the eggs arrived, the whole thing took off. By the time we'd been through the egg cycle of 6 eggs, 4 hatching and 3 owlets surviving, the interest was much greater. At this point we crowdfunded for a 32" monitor to display the owl cams directly at the back of the church. (The church is used a bit like a village hall - everything from young farmers to slimming world hold meetings in there). I also received a further donation to expand the number of cameras, and a donation of some 'used' equipment from a local CCTV company (if you have one - they can be worth approaching - that in return for a mention in your facebook posts - they might want to donate an old network video recorder and a couple of used cameras)
Current equipment:
12 x cameras of which 9 are on the livestream at any time - once we get eggs - I'll change it to a quad screen so there's more focus on the owlbox. We can adjust remotely which of the cameras are on the livestream at any time.
3 of the cameras are PTZ - so we can move them around and see what the owls are up to - 1 is super super budget with very sporadic movement - but cost £80 from Amazon warehouse - 1 is budget Hikvision and can be had for about £150 including microphone - 1 is mid-range/budget Hikvision which was about £280.
Dedicated Hikvision 16 channel network video recorder with 2tb surveillance drive (Around £250)
Youtube streaming device (From Amazon - around £200)
More cables. More POE switches.
So there's now a monitor as mentioned above:
This is the NVR and the Youtube streaming device:
The various POE switches providing power to the cameras at the top of the tower and to various points around the church itself. The left POE is a very cheap amazon job - was the first one I bought and still doing ok - the middle Hikvision one has a boosted POE on ports 1 & 2 as we have two power hungry PTZ's - one in the tower for the owls and one in the church for livestreaming weddings, funerals etc. The third switch is a Tenda - these seem decent quality in build/size and performance - this one is powering most of the tower static cameras. We've also added an independent microphone for the youtube stream running through a budget mixer on the left hand side (it provides 48v phantom power for the microphone 30m above it). It's all covered with a greenhouse polytunnel as the walls are crumbling, and there's fine powder falling off the walls on a daily basis (this was a recent add-on as everything was getting covered).
I took this before adding another cheapie Amazon PTZ - but I'm sure you can spot a few of the cameras:
Hopefully that gives you an insight into what I did, and what I learnt. You might be able to achieve similar by starting small, gaining local popularity, getting some donations and then building it further after your first owl eggs. You're right that once the eggs are laid, the space is a no-go area until the owlets are ready to be ringed. Usually you can get in touch with your local owl trust to find out a local ringer - and then when he or she goes up to do the ringing - go up with them!
These were the four we had in 2023 - of which three survived. (One fell from the tower after trying to fly too early - he was nicknamed 'Dangerous Brian' - we recovered him twice back to his owl box - but I think he was injured internally and didn't make it) - also bear in mind that it's nature - so it's not always pretty fluffy owls. There are dead rodents being eaten as well! And if an owlet dies - they eat that too... Here are they just as they were about to be ringed:
