What it is
Le guetteur is the lookout. It is a small, solar-powered camera that sits in the bush for months. When something moves, it takes an infrared photo, decides on the spot whether it’s an animal and roughly what kind, keeps the photo on its card and sends one short radio message:
23:14, stoat, 1 animal, 94 %, track cam 3.
The real pain today probably isn’t the camera. It’s the thousands of trail-camera photos of moving grass that someone has to look through by hand. [verify with the groups who do this]
Two modes, one box
- Predator watch, on trap lines and fence gaps: stoats, ferrets, cats, rats, possums, hedgehogs.
- Penguin gate, on a path into a little penguin (kororā) colony at dusk and dawn: how many come home each night.
Honest about the word “census”
A photo can’t tell one stoat from another, so for predators the output is an index — detections per 100 camera-nights — which is what ecologists use to see whether trapping is working. The penguin count comes closer to a real count, and it would have to be checked against burrow counts before anyone trusts it.
How it works
The camera node uses a tiny microcontroller with a camera on board. A hub — any ordinary computer, no expensive graphics card — re-checks the photos overnight with open models, learns New Zealand species from volunteer corrections, and exports data in the formats groups already use. Frames with people in them are blurred or deleted and never shared.
Where it stands
A written proposal, nothing more. Like the trap sensor, it only gets built if the people in the field want it.
Les plans sont gratuits — the plans are free.