The wildlife and reservoirs protection, hunting department daily guards the nature of the Berezinsky Biosphere Reserve. They face the task of preventing violations of the environmental regime and ensuring it throughout the territory. Therefore, raids on the territory are carried out both during the day and at night. The inspectors are armed with special modern tools that provide lots of opportunities to carry out raid activities, such as detecting animals and identifying and suppressing offenses in the protected area. These include surveillance tools such as thermal imagers and camera traps.
Camera traps are equipped with a high sensitivity motion sensor, thanks to which they detect changes in temperatures caused by the movement of a person or animal in the area of observation.
Digital forest cameras automatically take a photo or video and send the images via GSM network to a mobile phone. They instantly notify the inspectors about the movement in the monitoring area of the camera. Through the operation of the LED backlight, a sufficiently good quality of images is ensured, which helps to identify violators of the reserved regime. Fortunately, large mammals are caught on camera much more often than poachers.
Also, to observe wildlife, the staff of the reserve uses a thermal imager – a device for capturing images in the infrared range of waves. A thermal imager is able to detect a person or an animal, or rather, the heat emanating from it, at a great distance. The principle of its operation is based on the perception of the thermal radiation of objects in a range invisible to the human eye by the matrix of the device. However, it’s way better to use the device at night, when the thermal radiation of objects is greater than the temperature of the environment, so a clear picture of the events taking place is formed.
The Berezinsky Biosphere Reserve is a real Bearlandia. And animals have recently begun to regularly visit a field sown with oats, which is located very close to the administrative center of the Berezinsky Reserve, the village Domzheritsy. At night, bears, deer and hares graze peacefully not far from each other. Such a picture was seen through a thermal imager and recorded by a forest guard inspector during the night patrol of the territory. Animals located at a distance of 50-100 m from the camera were clearly visible on the screen of the thermal imager.
Night shots of 2 bears and a herd of deer with cubs, filmed with a thermal imaging camera, can be watched on our Youtube channel.
