Nightjar launches: the AI camera that warns rangers before a poacher strikes

Today RESOLVE introduced Nightjar, the company it spun out to build and sell TrailGuard AI, a hidden camera that spots poachers on the trail and alerts rangers in real time.¹ We wrote Nightjar’s brand narrative and tagline, designed its identity and built the new home for the product, nightjar.tech. Its line is three words long: Nature is watching.

Rangers guard huge places, and old cameras only see the past

A ranger team might be a handful of people looking after hundreds of square miles. Ordinary camera traps help them count animals, but they store pictures on a memory card. By the time anyone checks it, whatever walked past is long gone, and so is the poacher.

TrailGuard AI changes the timing. It is a camera small enough to hide on a tree along a trail, with an AI chip inside that tells wildlife, people and vehicles apart on the spot. When it sees a person where no person should be, it sends the picture to rangers over the cell network, often within about 15 seconds.²

It started as a prototype in RESOLVE’s conservation program. Its first field test, in East Africa in 2018, led to 30 arrests. In India it watched over the Kanha–Pench tiger corridor and the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, where its alerts led to the arrest of four poachers who entered the forest after dark.³ In 2023 TIME named it one of the year’s Best Inventions.⁴

A company needed a story as strong as its camera

By 2024 TrailGuard had outgrown a nonprofit program. RESOLVE spun out Nightjar, a social benefit enterprise, to manufacture it and get it into more parks.¹ RESOLVE says Nightjar’s mission is to “design and build rugged, effective AI-powered technology for conservation and security.”¹ The new company had a proven product, a TIME badge and pre-orders from wildlife managers.³ What it didn’t have was a voice of its own.

We started with an old proverb: character is what you do when no one is watching. Our narrative turns it around. Nature sees us at our worst, prowling in the dark and taking what isn’t ours. It also sees us at our best, standing guard over vast spaces and risking life and limb to protect them.

The camera is how the second half wins. The narrative ends on the line that became the brand: “Let every forest, savannah, and mountain whisper a warning: nature is watching. And so are we.”

It is a warning to poachers and a promise to everyone else. And it gave the site its working lines: Seeing is protecting. These eyes don’t blink.

Building nightjar.tech: a site you see through the lens

The site is dark on purpose. Every section is shot as if you were looking through the camera at night, with green night vision, grain and the red boxes the AI draws around whatever it finds: an elephant, a rhino, a logging truck, people on a trail at night. You don’t read about what TrailGuard does so much as watch it happen.

Then the site gets practical, because its readers are park managers with budgets and checklists. It walks through the onboard AI, the battery that lasts more than a year in the field and the 250-millisecond trigger. One section calls the camera “a burglar alarm for a billion-square-foot home.” Another introduces Nightjar IQ, the dashboard where rangers set alert rules and route them to email, Telegram or EarthRanger. And it takes orders: TrailGuard starts at $799 a camera.²

Character is what you do when no one is watching. Nature is watching.

The same alert protects people, too. Around India’s tiger reserves, rangers forward TrailGuard’s pictures to villages over WhatsApp and Telegram, so villagers can learn, in the words of RESOLVE’s Piyush Yadav, that “there is a tiger 300 meters away from their location.”³ In West Bengal the cameras watch for elephants moving toward farms, and the site’s use cases run from illegal logging and mining to wildlife crossing roads and railways.⁴²

From RESOLVE’s divide to Nightjar’s night

This is our second launch with this family. In 2024 we gave RESOLVE itself a new narrative, identity and site, built on the idea that RESOLVE steps into the divide between a problem and its solution. TrailGuard was one of the programs on that site. Now it has a brand and a home of its own, and RESOLVE’s announcement points readers straight to nightjar.tech.¹

The field record belongs to RESOLVE, Nightjar and the rangers who carry the alerts. Our job was to make sure the company behind the camera launched with a story as clear as the product: the forest has eyes now. RESOLVE’s stated goal for Nightjar is 100 parks protected in three years.⁵