Hi all, 

What a wonderful forum I've come across during my research!  

I am a zookeeper currently working on a project involving remote weights of some of our bird collection at the zoo where I work.  We currently house well over 1000 individuals representing a couple hundred species; one of the largest in the world.  of the size of our collection, it is rare for any of our flighted birds to have regular weights taken; some may go their entire lives without being weighed until they a) have a medical issue or b) are sent to another institution for a breeding recommendation.  Some are never weighed which makes for an interesting conundrum as weight can be a great indicator of health, given the tendency of birds to mask illness.  

My current goal is to create a scale set-up to remotely weigh birds in our collection.  The vast majority of our birds carry leg bands to aid in identification (we have colonies of over a hundred of some species) and one hurdle I've come across in my remote scale adventure has been to find a way to capture the IDs of the birds we would like to weigh.  I think a camera trap is the best option, however, I'm running into 2 problems.  1) the resolution on any of the game cams we currently possess is not good enough to read some of the smaller bands.  2) most of the game cams we have (most are very cheap) do not register things close to them, or if they do, they're wildly out of focus.  

I've been doing a lot of research on which cameras may be appropriate for this use.  I saw someone's amazing post about using a zoom lens to help get better resolution closer to the subject.  In the case of my set-up, would there be a particular camera trap that might work better?  These captures would all be in daylight.  The camera can be any distance from the bird, but keep in mind some of these birds are very small, as are their bands (think smaller than an American house finch, all the way up to very large pigeons on the scales).  

Can someone help me narrow down my search for the perfect camera trap?  I was contemplating maybe using a GoPro and banking on the fish-eye lens to help with the close-up, but I don't know how well GoPro focuses up close.  Motion detection would be great also, but some of these birds are pretty quick and I've found all the trail cams we have currently are too slow to capture what's needed and don't do burst mode for photos.  We have a generous group of donors who would hopefully bankroll this project, so money isn't a HUGE hurdle, but with the cost of the scales, I'd like to keep it under $1000.  

Thank you all so much for your help!