Only two occasions though out of more than 60. All the other times they were just traveling through.
And I also don’t believe those two times they were a threat to the horses, more likely just curious. But I didn’t have the full visibility enough to be sure as there was just one camera. So I called the farmer to be in the safe side.
Now I think there are no more wolves there. It’s been weeks since Insaw them. They have either dispersed or killed on the roads.
There is a lot not to be proud of about human behavior. Still.. one has to try to be a little positive about there being hope as hopelessness is contagious.
Sure they are. But try mentally reversing the situation. If any other single species occupied and changed the landscape as much as humans they would be viewed by humans as the most horrific plague on earth.
So I'm just a little empathy would be well placed here. A little effort to try and co-exist with the other inhabitants would not be out of place and as a bonus you can think a little better of yourself.
The systems I developed are. It based on microcontrollers. But secure boot Linux systems. They detect wolves within 2 seconds on pi based version, sub second on the jetson based ones.
Then websocket connected subscribers speak a loud alert to wake the person up and auto load the camera view over the permanently up VPN.
The person monitoring can then verify on how ever many cameras are connected and illicit many different kinds of responses.
This is not a standard wild camera setup. I’m using high resolution 640x512 res thermal modules to see night and day.
Our system is already being used in Greenland for polar bears and has detected bears three times now from a long distance and the safety group were able to chase it away. There it’s monitoring 22 cameras with a single jetson.
And indeed, the idea is very rapid detection and validation and then potentially remote active response. It has all the necessary controls.
Oh there no denying that they are a threat to live stock that are not protected. And sometimes even when they, as the sometimes can get over fences.
In the Netherlands there are 14 wolf packs and 144 wolves in a geographical small area where the surrounding farms are often full of a lot sheep.
But it’s also easy to imagine that if you can become aware of the presents of wolves sufficiently early enough and reliably enough before they attack your animals then you have a chance to prevent an attack. And if you prevent enough attacks it becomes maybe harder than sticking to natural prey.
Wolves don't like taking risks. Interacting with humans is definitely risky. Detecting wolves reliably early and responding, either in person if that can be done quick enough, or setting off responses, ideally followed up by a human visit could well result in the wolves avoiding that farm in any case. The extend to which this can work in practice is something that needs to be determine through research and pilots. Wolves are very smart, so if tech is going to be able to help here, then the tech has to be very capable. The start with pilots and research two elements are needed. People with tech, but also people in the affected areas with a willingness to collaborate.
The current highly polarized environment is throwing road blocks against such collaboration.
The current situation is such that owners are unaware of the presence of wolves at their borders, so there is currently also not a lot of perceived risk associated with attacking live stock. A useful goal is to start to change that. And the people who read hacker news I'm sure that think of many ways to change the status quo. My system is one example.
Sadly, a lot time went by without trying these methods. None the less, one should try.
I the past I have offered free equipment to people to test who had been publicly expressing concern about the arrival of the wolf but they would not accept it.
And no, it's not a glorified trail camera. Very different.
Everyone wants to kill before trying measures to keep people and their animals apart.
I don't think you can say it does nothing to help people live with wolves because it's not being tried. It's not being tried, because people being convince the only thing that helps is killing everything that requires a bit of effort to live with. I realize it's very human to destroy and kill, but I think we should strive to do better.
Humans have already stolen so much from nature and the animals, don't you think a little effort to do better would be a good thing?
We have a solar powered thermal local AI wolf detection system that’s been in a field in Belgium for more than 8 months now, monitoring the wolves there. Thermal image motion detection can detection them at much greater distances than PIR sensors and of course in complete darkness.
The biggest barrier at the moment to living with wolves, if you true away the human resistance to the idea, is reliable detection for early warning prevention.
This is not such a hard problem with computer vision at the level that it is these days. We’ve made it more effective by coupling it with thermal imaging camera modules.
Now we just need people willing to want to want to work with such pilot project, which turns out to be a pretty big problem.
However, it’s possible that a few influential success stories can bring change to the situation. But there has to be a start first and certainly when this started to be a problem, anything along the lines of prevention was seen as a barrier towards killing them which is what the solution in many people’s eyes is.
I have a good relationship with our supplier and they apply for all necessary legal requirements.
What country are you from ? There’s a list of countries that we can ship to (Only whole systems as that’s our product). 640 resolution requires export licenses for us to countries outside of the EU. We apply for those for our customers. You will need to supply end user statements and identify who you are.
The modules we ship have 25 fps frame rate.
The UK is in the list of countries we can ship to. It is outside of the EU so we would need to apply for an export license for you.
384x288 resolution does not require an export license for us to ship to the UK. But it does require an end user statement.
However, if the UK also requires an import license, then I have no advice for you here. Interesting to know though, as it would complicate exporting to there.
I developed my own one out of very high quality modules from China and added the software to the Pi so all of the driver software is developed in the Netherlands from our company. Note this was no small matter. It's a product now. But currently we sell them on a project mode till we get all the scalability in place to sell them as boxed units.
Plus the run the pi in secure boot mode with encrypted drives, precisely so we can sell them as a product without loosing all our IP that goes into this. Another nice things about the Pi 5 as a platform as it's possible to do this.
The modules originally come from the company behind guideIR. Personally I think they are the best thermal sensors available. They have amazing onboard image processing so that the living things really popout in the image, you can see this in the videos.
We have photos in the banner for the website. The modules are tiny but we 3D print rain shielding enclosures for them.
The modules draw just 1W of power, so they are great for our wildlife camera systems. And of course, they get images day and night. And we use thermal image motion detection to trigger the local AI inference. Normal PIR triggered wildlife systems can only triggrer on largish animals quite close by (Check out the wild boar video from this morning, you could never detect this with a traditional wildlife camera that uses PIR sensors https://youtu.be/rmav8IjWxeo). We can detect animals easy in the 50-100m range and with 24/7 thermal recording we can go back in time, invaluable for behavioral research.
I'm pretty sure we have the only wildlife camera system with thermal modules in high resolutions. All thanks to the Pi 5.
(Actually, we also run this with an ultra low light visible camera, also recording 24/7. With audio in both thermal and visible stream. Running on the same platform). Videos also online with the other videos.
PI's are expensive. But they have a very stable and well developed software eco system and are really flexible.
I still buy them. And a lot of them. Because with a Raspberry Pi 5 I'm able to make amazing wildlife camera sysetems that use thermal imaging and local AI to make an extremely effective solar powered wolf detector. I have a system in the field that's been running continuously since September 29 2025, over 8 months autonomously. It also records full frame thermal video in h264 24/7 and I can remotely retrieve images and video. That's a lot of functionality on a Pi 5.
I've collected over 60 videos of wolves from just one site with a Raspberry Pi 5 in this manner. In Belgium... Which is not exactly the biggest hot spot for wolves.
BTW. I’m autistic as will be many on this list. But the idea is that someone should pump someone else’s shit into me is incredibly sick. Sounds like something off doctor Mengelers playbook.
I DONT NEED CURING. There’s nothing wrong with me.
15,000,000 euros fines for all tech companies in Europe :-)