12358 When a male Boreal Owl visits its nest, it doesn’t linger long. The hunter arrives in the dead of night to deliver prey to its mate and chicks, then immediately flies away to start the ritual again. In 2012 Markéta Zárybnická, an ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague (CULS), set out to catch these fleeting moments in detail with her colleagues. The birds are endangered in the Czech Republic, and learning more about their eating and breeding habits and how environmental factors affect these activities could help the researchers determine how to protect them. But because the raptors are nocturnal, little is known about their lives. “It’s very difficult to follow such a species,” Zárybnická says. So her team developed a clever solution: the Smart Nest Box, a wooden contraption (covered with slippery aluminum plates to thwart pine martens) that furtively films its tenants. Once an owl breaches the infrared light beam at the entrance, it takes...