Five of eight boxes have been hung in trees so far, including this one at the West Glacier golf course. Owls love golf courses because the short grass makes it easy to see and catch… Golf Course Installation

Our project’s official orchardist expertly hangs one of the first two boxes in Shelton while I connect a system controller module. We’re live! Thank you, All, for a successful first field operation!This project’s aggressive development… First boxes are up!

Here’s the post that none of you have been waiting for! Except maybe for Bob. Here’s image files being transmitted across 70 feet of cat5 cable at 1.8Mbps (five seconds for a 2MB image file)… A post for geeks

This picture reveals the motion sensors that will be sandwiched between the cedar wood box and the facade of fake barnwood. All eight of the owl boxes will have infrared (IR) beam-break sensor across the… Motion Sensors

The main circuit boards are up and running! I still need to build another tiny circuit board that gets embedded in the wood for detecting motion near the entrance hole. Things are on track for… 8,819 solder points later

Circuit boards from Shenzhen arrived! Only 15% tariff, I was expecting more. Even a 100% tariff would not make it worthwhile to fabricate circuit boards in the United States. The tariff would have to be… Circuit boards from Shenzhen

The inner layer of untreated cedar is finished. Next up is embedding the motion sensors across the entrance and then adding a facade of brown or grey fake barnwood. Delivery to Shelton by mid-January is… Eight Boxes!

We professional engineers refer to this as “making sausage”. This prototype looks bad alright, and only three weeks from initial field tests. Each of those yellow wires indicates one of my many screw-ups, changes, or… Egads what a mess!

In the beginning there was wood! Enough here to build eight instrumented nest boxes for Megascops (screech owls). Plus two RodentCam platforms. The nest box design started with Cornell University’s recommended nest box design using… In the beginning…