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Our Blue tit Nest Box

Bird bnest boxWe have a Blue tit nest box on the side of our house which I made myself. It is made from untreated soft wood which has just been screwed together. it is quite useful to have it just screwed together as I can unscrew the front panel to clean out the nest box at the end of the season.

The nest box has a hinged lid at the top to give access and this is covered in a piece of roofing felt to give it a bit more protection from the elements. There is a small hook and clasp to keep it closed.

You may have notice from the photograph that it has four holes in each of the two sides. These have frosted perspex in them to allow a bit more light into the nest box to give a better colour rendition for the camera during daylight hours. We have already had blue tits in the nest box before so it doesn't seem to put them off.

I made the nest box slightly taller than normal to accommodate an IP camera. You can see from the photo that there is some black conduit running to the nest box. This conduit has the data cable in it for the IP camera that runs back to the POE switch in our loft.

The conduit also contains the 12v power supply cable for the camera microphone. As the nest box is just to the right and slightly above of our kitchen window I took the 12v power supply in from our kitchen. I drilled a hole through the wall which you can see is covered by the grey junction box. The hole is just above the cupboard units in the kitchen and you cannot see it when standing in the kitchen.

Fortunately for us, when we had our kitchen put in the electrician had put in a socket for the extractor fan over the hob on top of the cupboards. I simply put in a 4 gang extension lead which nicely sits on top of the cupboards and plugged the extractor fan into ii and the 12v power supply for the IP camera microphone.

The bird box camera.

The wooden insert that holds the IP camera.

Bird box showing the microphone wiring

Room was left at the top for the IP camera and microphone wiring.