A hand held thermal imaging camera provides a fascinating insight into the nocturnal and daytime lives of birds, and wildlife. 

Thermal imaging is an invaluable technology which works to highlight objects that would usually remain invisible in total darkness, daylight, and even in dense fog when thermal contrast is low.

Using infrared radiation and thermal energy, thermal imaging devices gather information about objects through a thermal sensor (microbolometer) attached to a special type of lens (usually made from Germanium), to formulate clear images of the observed objects.

Able to view in all weather conditions and whether it is day or night a thermal imager minimises disturbance of nesting sites, or migratory species habitat to ensure that minimal impact takes place but with the ability to find and identify different species for thermal wildlife surveys and thermal birding.

We take a look at the range of thermal cameras and their uses, providing a solution for capturing night data and monitoring nocturnal behaviour.

Thermal Cameras and Their Uses

Thermal cameras have a variety of uses and we have supplied them for various wildlife applications including

• Anti poaching activity monitoring on rare bird and raptor nesting areas by Police.
• Monitoring Geese species in the Solway with a local ecology specialist
• Monitoring breeding Storm Petrels in England
• Goose tracking and education projects
• Bird ringing and tagging 
• Ecological and Environmental Impact Surveys
• Monitoring bats and birds of prey nesting sites
• Deer surveys and counts
• Wildlife impact surveys such as bat presence without disturbance
• Checking for successful breeding in rare species
• Assessing hare and other species numbers 

Being able to carry out wildlife surveys day or night enables users to count, and species identify without causing disturbance, this is particularly useful when surveying species such as badgers or bats, where any impact has to be minimised.

You can easily spot Pippistrelle bats over Threave Castle at night, and count them with ease using a relatively inexpensive thermal camera such as the Pulsar Axion XM30F at long range, but also in turn use the same camera to monitor a badger set from hundreds of meters away, and be able to tell family members apart with impressive detail.

Thermal technology can be confusing but this helpful thermal jargon page will help you understand NETD values, Sensor resolutions and more which it comes to Choosing The Right Thermal Imager.

Popular thermal imaging wildlife camera for wildlife surveys, thermal birding, bird ringing and ecology

By far our best selling hand held thermal camera for wildlife surveys, the Helion 2 XP50 PRO features two of the top requested features for wildlife surveys, a highly sensitive sub 25mk NETD value and a 640x480 sensor resolution, which allows the camera to detect minute differences in temperature, which is required for spotting small heat signatures such as bats, mice etc but also the higher resolution sensor allows you to identify what you are looking at.

Whilst the Helion 2 XP50 PRO is not cheap...and cheaper thermal cameras WILL provide enough detail for most surveys, the Helion PRO for example when viewing deer allows you to tell if the deer is a buck or a doe, where as a cheaper thermal camera with lower resolution sensor will show minimal detail, so the buck or doe with Helion PRO, is purely a "deer shaped blob"

Thermal Birding by Dr Larry Griffin 

Counting and catching geese for research and conservation purposes is difficult at the best of times and is normally something only possible in daylight, not a problem you would think for most species.

However, the UK’s rarest species of wintering goose, indeed one of its rarest regularly occurring bird species in general, is the Taiga bean goose Anser fabalis, with only 250 left in its regular haunts on the Slamannan Plateau near Falkirk. 

It is a cryptic species that hides away in hard to observe damp rush pastures and boglands that are difficult to view in the undulating landscape – they know just the spots to use to avoid scrutiny! Bean geese are shy and elusive and easily disturbed and so because of this habit of picking out of the way spots to feed and because of its tendency to fly to and from the roosts under cover of darkness it is very difficult to count.

The population’s tiny numbers and ability to pick many different fields or bits of fields over time also makes them very tricky to catch and indeed over the last two winters it has not been possible.

However, step forward the Infiray UH50 thermal imager…what a game changer for the study of this species! 

Luckily because Paul at Scott Country International is so amenable to the testing of kit it was possible to pick this monocular over many others during the months of testing.

What was needed was a unit that could give great pictures but could also work for a long period in the field unmanned on a single charge if necessary and link over Wi-Fi to an observer many meters away.

With this amazing bit of kit, it is not only possible to follow and take pictures of flight lines at night and thus count the birds on a computer later with much greater accuracy, but it is also possible to spot them in the denser rush pastures by day and quickly scan the landscape for the flocks. The distance over which it picks up their heat signature is ridiculous and of course along the way one can enjoy spotting hares and all sorts of other species that remain out of sight under normal observational conditions.

Furthermore, in this line of work, catching and marking birds and especially tagging them with GPS collars is so important to our understanding of why they are so rare and what factors about their ecology is driving their rarity. Illegal hunting is still an issue as is poor reproductive success and this work has only recently uncovered their international flyway route, staging areas and breeding grounds for the first time.

Now is the time to build on that knowledge and get to grips with nesting success and so there was a need to apply the latest collars to the birds. 

With feeding field catching opportunities rare and dwindling, the Infiray gave a new dimension to explore and after three days in the cover of a frosty shelter belt over-looking a field pool roost site, it was possible on Guy Fawkes night, to let off one of the louder bangs of the evening when a canon net catch of birds was secured at dark and the females were GPS collared.

Because the picture quality is so good on the ZH50 it was possible to see any snipe bobbing in the catch area and any teal or even a mouse hopping along the net, the detail was amazing, even for the tussocks of grass and the water and all the other shapes and structure within the landscape; and that was at over 100m from our hide screen.

Coupled with 4 packets of hand warmer sachets to mark the catching area before the birds arrived, a new catching method had been born, and watching the GPS tags online, they were already pinging from the roost two nights later which is amazing for such a reclusive bird. 

As such the Infiray Unique UH50 seems to be a tremendous piece of kit for the serious ecologist.

Dr Larry Griffin