This is what a young great tit (Parus major / Meantán mór) looks like when it is pecking a camera lens. Or at least trying to.
I have a GoPro camera plus an attachment to fix it to the handlebar of a bike (see picture below) – the attachment works just as well to fix the camera to the branch of a tree. I have a bird-feeding station set up on the other side of my back garden. The birds that visit my garden like to first fly to the tree and have a look around to check if the coast is clear, before flying over to the feeders (it is the very reason I planted the tree there in the first place). It is a bit hit-and-miss deciding where to place the camera – I picked a branch that the birds seemed to frequent, and let it run (in video mode) until the battery ran out (about 90 mins).
The camera sits inside a waterproof housing, and the front of the housing is a bit like a mirror, depending on the angle. That is probably why the bird is trying to peck the camera housing – you can hear and see it pecking at the lens covering and, at one point, he goes behind the camera to see whats going on there. The image above is a freeze-frame from the video – the bird is so close that it is out of focus, but you can see its ‘gape’ – the orange outline of the bird’s mouth. When a parent bird is feeding chicks in the nest, it stuffs food into the gapes (i.e. the hungry chicks open mouths). The red colour fades as birds get older, but the bird pictured above has just recently fledged. Right now, my back garden is a carnival of chirping and fluttering – there are families of sparrows, goldfinches and tits that have recently fledged, and the chicks are still chasing their parents for food.
In the video, the white spots in the picture are rain-drops – it has been raining for the last 24 hours, since just after lunchtime yesterday. The entire video is just over four minutes long, and the little fellow above makes an appearance at the 3 minute, 26 second point. You can also see this bird (as well as one of its parents) eating sunflower seeds – they sound like woodpeckers in the video (sound tends to be amplified by the camera housing). The effort taken to crack the seeds open doesn’t deter them – I have three feeders which I have to refill daily. There is also a robin (Erithacus rubecula / spideog) at the beginning of the video – it is my constant companion when I’m out working in the garden.
The video is best watched in high definition – click on the HD in the bottom righthand corner of the video.
Waterproof camera housings for the GoPro Hero2 (left) and a similar camera. The earlier GoPros came with a housing with a rounded front element, which meant that it wouldn’t focus clearly underwater. I was able to buy this 3rd party accessory online. You can see how reflective is the front screen (it is reflecting the pattern of the ceiling in the picture above). You can also see the clamp attachment for fixing to the tree.