I AM definitely not a technical gadget person. For me, Bluetooth will always be a 10th century Viking king and hands-free means riding a bike recklessly. My (grown-up) children ridicule me for still using a road atlas in preference to a sat-nav.

That said, I have recently invested in a bit of digital gear that has significantly improved my ability to watch wildlife - a stealth camera.

Basically it’s a digital camera with an inbuilt motion sensor. You tie it to a tree, or other immovable object in the outdoors, press the “go” button and leave it for a few hours, usually overnight.

While you are having your tea, watching Match of the Day or in bed asleep, anything that walks or flies in front of the camera breaks a motion-sensitive infrared beam and the animal takes its own picture – brilliant.

As expected for a proven technophobe, my first attempts at using the camera trap weren’t brilliant; sometimes there were no photos at all because I didn’t have it pointing towards an animal’s path or it took scores of pictures of a random branch waving in the wind. I finally got the hang of it though and last month it helped me solve the mystery of the plucking post.

Not far from where I live is a patch of scrubby heathland bordering a conifer plantation. One of the pine trees had snapped in the wind and on one of my recent walks I noticed that the exposed trunk end was decorated with bird droppings, and the ground beneath it with tufts of rabbit fur. It looked like some predator had been using the fallen tree as a dining table.

When I returned two days later most of the rabbit fur had either blown away or been borrowed by birds to line their nests with, but there were pigeon feathers everywhere. What’s more, the pigeon itself was still there, or what was left of it, lying on top of the plucking post half-eaten.

I figured that the killer was likely to return to finish off its meal, so set up my camera trap on a nearby birch tree and trained on the dead pigeon, switched it on and slipped away quietly.

On my return the following morning, the pigeon had gone, which was promising, and the camera display said that 17 pictures have been taken – but of what? As the plucking post was well off the ground it was almost certainly a bird of prey rather than a mammalian predator, like a stoat or a fox.

As to which raptor – well, a pigeon is too big a quarry for a sparrowhawk or a kestrel and red kites, that do eat rabbits at least, aren’t often seen in Ryedale. By a process of elimination, the elusive hunter was likely to be a buzzard or a goshawk but the only way to confirm it was to slot the camera memory card into my computer and look at the photos.

Sure enough, the first image was of an animal but not the one that I was expecting. It was the out-of-focus head of a passing roe deer, with frame number two its retreating backside.

Thankfully, all the remaining 15 pictures were of my mystery hunter which turned out to be a common buzzard. The camera’s timer showed that the buzzard had repeatedly returned to the pigeon to feed, even twice in the middle of the night when it was caught on infrared night-vision mode.

My stealth camera has definitely been fun and interesting for me but for professional ecologists the world over they are proving invaluable tools in important research.

It was feared, for instance, that the Amur leopard was extinct in China, and likewise the Siamese crocodile in Cambodia, until they both turned up on camera traps.

Some animals, like the Annamite striped rabbit from Vietnam and the Tanzanian grey-faced elephant shrew, were completely unknown to science before they kindly took their own pictures for visiting zoologists. Closer to home (and reported in this paper), the first conclusive proof that pine martens are alive and well in Dalby Forest came last summer when a camera trap set by scientists from the Yorkshire Pine Martin Project took video footage of a healthy-looking adult male marten scampering up and down the trees there.

If you fancy having a go with a stealth camera, maybe to see what creatures visit your garden during the hours of darkness, it’s a cheap hobby (mine cost £60) and if a technological numpty like me can get it to work then anyone can.