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 rodents. This box showed a few mid-day bursts of exploratory activity during the first two days, possibly pine squirrels. I don’t know for sure what poked into the box because this golf course box only has motion and weather detection but no camera. I didn’t have enough cameras for all of the boxes. I just now ordered ten more camera boards from Shenzhen because the camera boards are working well in the field so far. I will add a camera to this golf course box if it detects nocturnal activity. We haven’t seen nocturnal activity at any of the boxes but we examined only a few days of data so far.
At least one of the boxes has issues when direct sunlight hits the lightbeam motion detector. Strong sunlight causes false detections of motion. This glitch is a perfect example what this initial field testing is intended to reveal. I have a fix in the works involving longer dark tubes for the light detector, and better transparent windows for both the light emitter and the detector. For now, until I can rework the vulnerable boxes, it’s easy enough to identify the sunlight glitches because it happens at exactly the same time of day on sunny days. We can focus on the nocturnal activity for now.
