Hi David, I’m not sure if there are thermistors long enough to wrap around the entire rim (let alone if their reaction time is sensitive enough for your needs), but you could certainly have several thermistors end to end even if these don’t exists. I imagine the trick is to make sure they are all calibrated similarly, which is very doable. I’m not sure how you are detecting the feeding trip, but some sort of pressure sensor would be interesting.
I would suggest looking at Arduino and the available multitude of sensors available. The coding is not that difficult - ensuring everything is waterproof might be hardest thing to figure out, but not impossible. Dave David Glover, PhD Senior Research Associate at the Aquatic Ecology Laboratory College of Arts and Sciences Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology 221 Research Center, 1314 Kinnear Road, Columbus, OH 43212 614-688-2256 Office / 618-201-1810 Mobile / 614-292-0181 Fax [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ael.osu.edu<http://ael.osu.edu/> On Jan 15, 2016, at 1:50 PM, David Whitacre <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I would like to detect, via a temperature spike, when an adult songbird makes a feeding trip to the nest. A thermistor and data logger would work, but do thermistors exist that are 6 or 7 inches long that could be attached around the rim of the nest so that a temperature spike would be recorded no matter where on the nest rim the adult perches?
