We have been receiving great pictures from the Naturewatch community showing the different setups people have built for their cameras. Amongst these pictures, we’ve seen some cameras that have been camouflaged using camo tape and army camo netting. We have been playing around with DIY ways to make fake foliage to hide the cameras in the wild. Here are some ideas if you would like to get crafty.
Make your own foliage by taping green individual ‘leaves’ made out of cut-outs of print greenery. You can use images of bright green grass, paintings of landscapes or any pattern that can resemble forest camouflage. After printing different types of foliage in green card, we cut circles in different sizes. You can use a scalpel or circle cutter to do this or go freestyle to create irregular shapes. We then recreated foliage around the camera by taping the circles individually along the surface.
After testing the camouflaged camera in our garden we noticed that the leaves are changing colour due to the season so we also made an autumn version of the foliage using red and yellow leaves.
If you would like to try this you can also use old magazines or card packaging with tones of the foliage you would like to recreate. This initial idea works as a temporary camouflage, for more permanent solutions we will experiment with other materials.
Let us know if you have any ideas for camouflaging your Naturewatch kit by sending us your pictures to interaction@gold.ac.uk