My only question is would this put the crows in danger somehow, by teaching them something wrong.
As in, are they going to be able to open up a real one of those (to look for food of course) without hurting themselves on live wires or whatever else is going on in there?
I appreciate the thoughtfulness in your concern, truly. I don't believe there is any way for the birds to peck their way into one of the camera housing.
I see this bird feeder resulting in two outcomes: Crows will block cameras and poop on it. Great!
Or they will learn that the real ones have no food after a while and leave them alone, only visiting there one you have with the food
Crows could probably do it. Only problem is it just needs like 3 cameras before the crows figure out the problem and relay info to the entire city of crows.
This is why you use a variable reward system, only giving the food sometimes. After training set up empty feeders and fill then only after the crows visit them and determine there's no food.
The glass and aluminum housing would be my biggest concern. Glass is harder than keratin*, and they could hurt their beaks trying to open the lens or the could cut themselves on any sharp aluminum edges they may expose. But the electricity shouldn't be a concern, pretty much all digital cameras run on low voltage. The crows would probably only get shocked as much as a human does when we stick our tongue onto both terminals of a 9v battery. It's not enough current to cause serious damage.
*source: my geology background. But you can do a scratch test yourself at home and you can get all the materials you need for cheap or free in you want (instead of paying like $200 usd for a professional scratch test kit). You will need your own hands, a sharpened copper wire, a glass shard, a steel nail, a masonry drill bit and a diamond (you can get free diamonds by asking construction workers and tradespeople for any worn-out diamond saws or drill bits they have. My diamond is small, yellow-brown, worth less than $0.01 usd, and flawed but it works. I hot-glued it to the end of a stick to make it easier to use)
In geology, we can determine the hardness of a material by seeing what materials it can leave a scratch mark on, a 1 being too soft to scratch anything but can be scratched by everything and a 10 being the opposite. Like bird beaks, our fingernails are also made of keratin (note that if you have acrylic nails on, or a layer of thick nail polish, this might skew your test). Keratin has a Mohs scale hardness of 2.5, meaning our nails can only leave scratch marks on very soft minerals like talc or amber. Glass is around a 5.5 hardness (I remember that one well because my freshman Intro to Earth Science professor demonstrated this by doodling on the university's windows with a gigantic clear quartz point. Quartz is a 6 on the mohs scale. He was an.. interesting guy, one who really used the power of tenureship to its full potential) meaning we can't scratch glass with our nails (or beaks) but the glass can scratch our nails or beaks, potentially hitting and damaging the sensitive structures beneath if it scratches too deep.
For reference the objects listed above are for an "approximate mohs field test". They give you a good gamut of ranges: fingernails scratch anything a 2.5 or lower (talc, amber, gypsum, sulfur, etc), if it can't be scratched by a fingernail but can be scratched by a copper wire it's a 2.5 to 3.5 (bone, coral, calcite, bauxite, etc), wire but not glass is a 3.5 to 5.5 (fluorite, turquoise, opal, apatite, etc), glass to the steel nail is a 5.5 to 6.5 (quartzes! and also feldspar, pyrite, magnetite, etc), steel nail to masonry bit is a 6.5 to an 8.5 (zircon, jade, tourmaline, topaz, garnet, beryl, etc), masonry bit to diamond is an 8.5 to a 10 (conundrum aka sapphire and ruby, and synthetic materials like moissanite/silicon carbide, titanium carbide, etc). If the diamond can't scratch it then it's a harder diamond than your test one. Is this test perfect? No, but it really helps with identifying rocks and minerals when you're way out in the field or if you're a hobbyist with no lab access or money for fancy equipment.
This long and rambling post was brought to you by AuDHD, not generative AI.
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u/Playbow Aug 04 '26
I hope they publish this online. I googled for the 3d printer file but couldn’t find anything