I don’t suppose any of you know anything about trail cameras and rechargeable batteries, do you? I’m just about bald with hair tearing here, in my search for the damned things.

One of my roles is Chair of the local community nature reserve. I love it. We run Young Ranger sessions once a month to enable children interested in nature to explore it in a safe space. This month we dissected barn owl pellets to see what the owl had been eating. Answer: voles.

And we are in the process of trying to identify all the flora and fauna that makes the place home.

In May we will have a group of school kids working towards some award the name of which currently evades me.

But the reason I’m looking for advice on trail cameras and rechargeable batteries is, we won an award ourselves, from the Co-op, to help us make the reserve more accessible. And I thought it would be lovely to have trail cameras dotted around the place so people who can’t physically get there can enjoy the wildlife inhabitants on their computer screens. And the rest of the board agreed 🌞

Great! But if we’re going to do this we need to do it before nesting begins and we don’t have much time. So I’ve spent most of the weekend and today (Monday) looking at the various options. And I’m starting to freak. Mostly because of the battery thing. We don’t want to have to change batteries all the bleeding time, and we probably can’t afford to. So I need rechargeables that are powerful enough to run the cameras for as long as possible. I’m told that this means they need to be at least 2700 mah (?) and 1.5v, but can I find that spec online? No I bloody can’t. When I search, tons of stuff comes up, but when I click on anything, I find they’re always 1.2v! I’m going crackers. 1.2v, I’ve been assured, will not do the job 🤯

So if anyone reading this uses the kind of batteries I need and has a favourite brand, please do share!