Currently, we should like to watch quail on our laptop and later other uses, perhaps. Would you make suggestions for beginners?
Birds are 50-100 foot out back,
Do you want an outdoor (water and temperature protected) or indoor web cam? Will there be external power where it is located?
Those are key questions to get a good answer.
It should function outdoor without protection . [But it rains here 2in per year on a wet year. Really good weatherproofing is not of high priority.]
The power will have to be battery. It will need a wireless connection.
It will be used only for birds. Should I better search for some other keywords, not webcam perhaps?
What you are looking to accomplish has been done but it still requires a rather unique setup to get it to work in any satisfactory way.
How much money are you looking to spend on this? Even a custom setup wouldn’t necessarily cost more than a few hundred dollars (or less) but your requirements generally preclude any off-the-shelf solutions that I am aware of.
The problems are that you need a ruggedized wildlife camera, an independent power source and the ability for the camera act as its own server to stream to the receiving devices. All of those requirements can be met individually fairly easily but it is difficult to meet all of them at the same time without some engineering skills.
Is solar power a possibility? There are solar powered webcams available but many people have just built their own combo of solar panels and a battery to power a standard wildlife webcam.
Most webcams work by being plugged directly into a computer via a USB port. The camera provides the image and the computer processes it. Things become more complex when you want a completely external camera not directly connected to anything. You need one that acts as its own server over Wi-Fi and the range is limited. 50 - 100 feet may work but not much more than that unless you want to to get into complexity that is an order of magnitude higher. The configuration of such a system is not trivial either. They won’t be devices that magically ‘talk’ to one another. You will have to figure out a way to make that happen.
I don’t want to discourage you. It sounds like a cool project that is perfectly technically feasible for someone with good engineering skills but a device that does exactly what you want may not be available at least as a single product.
The key words you need to use are some combination of: webcam, wildlife, outdoor, solar, wi-fi, built in server, streaming. I searched for it myself and all I came up with were some DIY projects that worked just fine but may be more effort than you are interested in.
I have a trail camera that will send back to a computer/laptop. It takes stills and short video. Motion sensor with IR for night.
I have never used the sending part, just took the SD card out & down loaded in my computer.
Eats 4 'D" cells pretty quick if set to max pictures/vids so I invested in rechargeable ones.
I also used an extension cord, a 12V wallwart, an red led & plugged into the external power port. Pit all that part in a upside down ziplock along with a pretty much wore out 12 UPS battery. Worked a long time, 8-10 months before the wallwart over cooked the battery. I was not using all the highest setting and max number of shots and there was not enough traffic to keep it from being too much.
I have an older generation of one like this. Google trail camera.