Science and research

Handykam ceased trading. This page is an archival record of a sector the company supplied. No equipment, bespoke build or support can be provided.

Over its trading life Handykam supplied camera equipment into several hundred research projects, working with university departments, institutes and field research groups here and internationally. The equipment went into projects on livestock and veterinary science, on avian behaviour and breeding success, and on rare and threatened species across a range of habitats. The technology allowed data to be collected for research, for monitoring, for follow-up work, and to support both protective legislation and funding applications.

Why a garden camera company ended up in research

It looks like an odd fit and it is not. What a researcher usually wants from a camera is exactly what a nest box owner wants, only more so: observe continuously, without being present, without altering the behaviour you are trying to measure. That is the entire design brief of a nest box camera. Low-voltage, unobtrusive, infra-red at night, running for months unattended — the same properties that let a blue tit ignore a camera in its ceiling let a field study record undisturbed behaviour.

The second reason was cost. Purpose-built scientific instrumentation is expensive, and a great deal of monitoring work does not need it. A camera that costs a fraction as much and can be deployed in numbers often produces more usable data than one very good camera in one place — coverage beats specification for a surprising range of questions.

What research projects actually asked for

• Continuous, unattended operation. Weeks or months without intervention, because every visit is both a cost and a confound.
• Night vision that does not affect behaviour. Infra-red is invisible to the species involved, which is the whole reason it is used rather than a lamp.
• Reliable time stamps and recording, so footage can be tied to other data.
• Motion-triggered recording, because reviewing continuous footage is the real cost of camera-based monitoring, not the equipment.
• Robustness in field conditions — weather, temperature range, dust, salt, livestock, and no mains power.
• Something a non-specialist can install. Fieldwork is often done by whoever is available, not by the person who specified the kit.
• Replaceability. Being able to buy an identical unit two years later matters more to a longitudinal study than any single specification.

Bespoke work

Where nothing suitable existed, the company designed and built equipment to suit. That is a genuine advantage of a small manufacturer that made its own boxes and configured its own cameras: an unusual mounting, an odd cable length, a non-standard power arrangement or a box shaped for a species nobody sells boxes for were all things it could simply make. Larger suppliers cannot economically do this, and it is frequently the difference between a project being possible and not.

Where the footage went

Monitoring footage from this kind of equipment feeds papers, reports, funding applications and long-run datasets, and it also does something less measurable: it lets funders, partners and the public see a project actually happening. A live or recorded feed is an unusually persuasive piece of evidence for work that is otherwise invisible.

For amateur and semi-professional observers, the equivalent route is the national recording schemes. The BTO Nest Record Scheme is the one nest box camera owners can contribute to directly, and it has produced one of the longest-running datasets on breeding success anywhere. Garden BirdWatch does the same for garden bird numbers, and the People's Trust for Endangered Species runs national mammal surveys.

The legal and ethical frame

Research on protected species is licensed work. Disturbance of Schedule 1 birds at the nest, any work involving bats or dormice, and a range of other activities all require licences — Natural England's guidance covers birds, and a parallel set covers bats. Cameras are not exempt: installing one in an occupied box is disturbance in the same way that opening the box is. This is a place where the equipment supplier's correct answer is always to point at the statutory body and the specialist charity rather than to give advice.

Related pages: Conservation · Education · UK Wildlife Trust links