How to Bird Survey

My focus of this week has been on researching the best techniques for a bird nesting survey. Through many papers the way I think will work best with what we want to achieve is to use thermography to map nesting locations. This has been done in grassland birds as well as several others and there is likely enough literature to find the best and most successful techniques. The issue we are running into is what to use for the thermo-camera, because they are very expensive. We are not a large research institution so we will not be able to spend what they would. We also would need to especially test the cheaper options to see if they can actually detect relatively small birds. The other factor will be how to detect how far away the bird is and whether we will mount an aerial camera or from the ground. Looking into range finders will be key. Both options have major complications involved that we need to research further.