Trail cameras: seeing what visits your garden at night

A trail camera is a weatherproof, motion-triggered camera that records in infrared after dark, so you can see what crosses your garden at night: hedgehogs, foxes, badgers, cats. Strap it low, aim it at a feeding dish or fence gap a metre or two away, and keep it pointed at your own ground. A good mid-range one does the job.

If you only want to know whether hedgehogs visit at all, there’s a cheaper answer at the end.

What you’ll actually learn

Hedgehog Street says night-time trail cameras are “very useful for working out who is visiting certain areas and how often”. In practice:

• Who’s eating the food. A camera soon shows whether it’s going to a hedgehog, a cat or a fox, and so whether your feeding station needs a brick in front of the entrance.
• Whether the house is in use, without opening it. A hedgehog house should be left alone from November to spring. A camera on the entrance answers “is anyone home?” without lifting the lid.
• How many, and how they behave. Hedgehog Street shows camera footage of up to four hedgehogs in one garden, two of them fighting. You’ll learn where a fox comes over the fence, and whether a badger visits at all.

Cameras matter to the science too. The National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme, led by PTES and the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, leaves trail cameras at survey sites for about a month to estimate hedgehog numbers for the first time. As of 30 October 2026, PTES says it is at capacity for new survey hubs, but anyone can help from home: the images are on MammalWeb, where volunteer “spotters” tag which animals appear.

What the specs mean

Few conservation bodies publish buying specs, and none of the ones we read gives a trigger-speed figure. Where the advice below is ours rather than a source’s, we say so.

• Close-range night exposure. The spec that matters most in a garden, and boxes rarely state it. The Wildlife Trusts’ camera guide warns that cheaper cameras “often record overexposed video and images when animals get within 1.5m of them” and may need 2m at night. Better models cope at about 1m.
• Detection range. Claims of 20m or more are for open fields. Most garden subjects are 1–3m away, so a long range buys you little. (Our reasoning.)
• Trigger speed and recovery time. How fast the camera fires after sensing movement, and how soon it’s ready again. A slow camera catches a fox’s tail; a hedgehog shuffling to a dish is more forgiving. We found no tier-1 figure, so treat speed as a nice-to-have. (Our reasoning.)
• No-glow or low-glow infrared. Low-glow cameras show a faint red glow when they fire; no-glow uses infrared you can’t see, usually at the cost of darker night images. We found no tier-1 source on whether either disturbs garden mammals, so we make no claim. (Our reasoning.)
• Video or stills. Video shows behaviour. The Wildlife Trusts’ guide uses 14-second HD clips with a 4-second gap between triggers; without a gap the camera may record constantly and drain the batteries. Stills are enough for “who came?”.
• Weatherproofing. Suffolk Wildlife Trust says budget cameras may not hold up to the weather. Mid-range cameras, which it mostly uses on its reserves, are better built.
• Batteries. A guide on Hedgehog Street, written by NatureSpy (a non-profit that also sells cameras), recommends lithium batteries for power, life and cold weather, and notes that rechargeables’ lower voltage can reduce sensitivity. A solar panel only pays if the camera stays in one sunny spot. (Our view.)
• SD card. The Wildlife Trusts recommend 8GB or above. Check the card each morning to make sure it isn’t full.

Where to put it

• Low. “I deploy the camera as low to the ground as possible,” says the Wildlife Trusts’ camera expert. The NatureSpy guide suggests about 20–30cm for hedgehogs, as a high camera looks over a small animal. Strap it to a fence post, washing-line pole or stake.
• At something they visit. Both Wildlife Trust guides say to aim at a feeding station or water bowl. Suffolk Wildlife Trust adds hedgehog holes, fence gaps and the edges of beds and lawns.
• The right distance. 1–2m, depending on your camera’s night exposure.
• Clear of waving plants. Waving vegetation “will trigger it constantly”, the Wildlife Trusts warn.
• Out of the low sun. Suffolk Wildlife Trust notes that sunrise and sunset can set the camera off. Pointing it roughly north keeps the low sun out of the frame. (The direction is our reasoning.)
• Give it time. Suffolk Wildlife Trust says don’t move it too quickly.

Don’t add food just to bring animals in front of the lens. Point the camera at the feeding you already do, using the same meaty food set out in what to feed hedgehogs.

Badgers: watch the path, never the sett

Under section 3 of the Protection of Badgers Act 1992 it is an offence to interfere with a sett. That includes obstructing an entrance or disturbing a badger “when it is occupying a badger sett”, and being reckless is enough. Don’t fix a camera at a sett entrance, don’t put food there, and don’t clear or dig around it. Point the camera at a path or fence gap the badgers use, well away from the sett.

Privacy: keep it on your own ground

GOV.UK’s guidance on domestic CCTV says that if your system “captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property”, the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 apply. You’d then need to tell neighbours, put up a sign, keep footage secure and no longer than needed, and answer requests from people you’ve recorded. The guidance is written for security cameras; we read it as covering any camera that records people beyond your boundary.

The simple answer is to aim low and inward, at your lawn, dish or fence gap, not across a neighbour’s garden or the pavement. Switch off sound recording; the guidance asks whether audio is needed at all. If a person appears in a clip, don’t post it online.

The cheaper alternative: a footprint tunnel

If your question is just “do we have hedgehogs?”, Hedgehog Street says footprint tunnels “are the only universally reliable way of telling if you have hedgehogs”.

The Mammal Society’s version is a cardboard box folded into a triangular tube about 90cm long, each side about 25cm. Clip paper at each end, tape a small dish of wet cat or dog food in the middle, and lay masking tape between, painted with equal parts charcoal powder and vegetable oil. Set it against a hedge or wall and check daily: a hedgehog walks through the “ink” to the food and leaves prints on the paper. Hedgehog Street offers a free survey guide.

Prints tell you a hedgehog came. A camera tells you which one, when and what it did. Start with the tunnel; buy a camera once you know there’s something to film.

The honest bit

The placement advice is consistent across The Wildlife Trusts, Suffolk Wildlife Trust and Hedgehog Street, but it is practical experience, not tested research. The buying specs are thinner: no tier-1 body we read gives a trigger-speed figure or says whether infrared glow bothers garden mammals, so those parts are labelled as our reasoning. The privacy guidance is written for security CCTV, and we’ve applied it to wildlife cameras cautiously. The badger law is not a grey area.