Handykam.com — bird box cameras, wildlife cameras and CCTV, preserved

Handykam ceased trading. This site is preserved as a reference archive of its wildlife-camera guidance and equipment. Nothing here is for sale, and no orders, enquiries or support can be handled.

For more than twenty years Handykam.com was a small, family-run wildlife camera company working out of west Cornwall. It hand-built nest boxes and owl boxes, assembled and tested camera kits to go inside them, sold trail cameras and camera traps, and ran a separate CCTV line for Cornish homes, farms and small businesses. Alongside the equipment it published a great deal of plain-spoken explanatory writing — how a nest box camera is actually powered, what size hole you have to drill through a wall, why most people who start with a wireless system end up going back to a wired one.

That writing is the reason this archive exists. The equipment has gone, but the explanations were good, they were specific to a genuinely awkward little corner of consumer technology, and a large part of the wildlife-watching web still points at them. This site preserves them, together with a descriptive record of the equipment they described.

What Handykam was

Handykam.com traded as a division of a UK limited company incorporated in 1997 and ran, in its later years, entirely online. It was a family business: a workshop that cut, glued, screwed and felted wooden boxes to a repeatable pattern, and a bench where small board cameras were configured, focused and tested before they went out with a cable and a power supply. It described itself as big enough to handle professional and research orders and small enough to answer individual customers personally, and the surviving material reads exactly like that — patient, slightly wry, and written by someone who had explained the same thing several hundred times.

The business ran across two clearly different eras. From the mid-2000s it sold through a folder-structured catalogue site; from around 2016 it rebuilt on a flat, article-led site with long help pages and a glossary. Both eras carried the same woodland-green identity and the same voice. This archive restores the later era, because that is where the explanatory writing lived.

What it made and supplied

The range fell into a handful of clear families, and the model index records them all with their original part numbers:

• Camera nest box systems — a hand-made wooden box with the camera, cable and power supply already matched to it, wired or wireless. The wired pine nest box system was the long-running staple; the 5MP WIFI bird box kit was the last major product the company launched.
• Boxes only, camera-ready — including the outdoor owl box, hedgehog boxes, dormouse boxes and plain pine bird boxes, each pre-modified with cable trunking and a camera mount.
• Camera kits for your own box — a camera, bracket, cable and power supply for people who already had a box they liked.
• Cameras only — small analogue board cameras and, later, 5MP IP cameras.
• Trail cameras and camera traps — bought in, tested and compared rather than manufactured.
• Recording and viewing — USB capture devices, digital and network video recorders, cables, splitters and switchers.
• CCTV — a separate Cornwall CCTV line, including farm CCTV for rural properties.

The part that was actually rare: the explaining

Plenty of companies sold nest box cameras. What made this one unusual was that it wrote down, in ordinary language, the things a first-time buyer discovers too late. Four articles in particular still carry the site:

• Wired or wireless camera? — the single best thing on the site, and an honest argument against the option most people assume they want.
• Camera resolution — conversion tables between television lines, megapixels and the resolution names printed on boxes.
• Choosing the best trail camera — the criteria that actually separate a good camera trap from a bad one.
• FAQ: WIFI IP camera — a two-thousand-word walkthrough of setting up a network camera in a bird box, written for people who do not want to learn networking.

Two A–Z glossaries sat alongside them, one slanted at wildlife camera terms and one at CCTV terms, and a family of short, specific FAQs covered cables, small wired analogue cameras, trail cameras and recorders.

Who used the equipment

Sales went to garden birdwatchers first and foremost, but the same kit ended up in schools and nurseries, in university departments, on wildlife trust reserves and inside conservation projects here and overseas. The company kept sector pages for education, science and research and conservation describing what each of those audiences tended to need, and those pages are preserved here. Low-voltage, plug-in-and-play equipment turned out to suit institutions for exactly the reason it suited beginners: very little could go wrong with it.

Watching wildlife responsibly

Nothing in this archive changes the law. In the UK, wild birds, their nests and their eggs are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and disturbing certain species at or near the nest requires a licence — the guidance from Natural England sets out which. If you are putting up a box rather than reading about one, the British Trust for Ornithology's nest box guidance and the RSPB are the right starting points, and the Barn Owl Trust is the authority for owl boxes specifically.

Using this archive

Everything here is written in the past tense on purpose. Part numbers, specifications and kit contents are recorded because they are how the web referred to these products for fifteen years, not because anything can be supplied. Where a page describes a setup procedure, it describes how the equipment was set up when it was current; where it explains a principle — cable runs, transmission frequencies, sensor resolution, infra-red switching — the principle has not changed and the page is still useful. Start at the model index for equipment, or at Wired or wireless camera? for the writing.