About
Comfy Creatures is a small family business in South-East Queensland, founded by electronics engineer and nature enthusiast Wesley Nielsen. We design and build the Comfy Creatures Monitoring Station, a stand-alone camera and environmental sensor made to live inside nest boxes and other artificial tree cavities.
Where it started
Wesley grew up on a Land for Wildlife property in Brisbane's western suburbs, inspecting the homemade nest boxes his father had built and installed. Finding roosting sugar gliders and nesting wood ducks around the family home planted the seed for Comfy Creatures.
Years later, while walking under some nest boxes on a bushwalk with friends, Wesley pictured public walking trails where anyone in the community could see the wildlife living inside them. It was surprising that a purpose-designed camera didn't already exist. Without one, Australia had a real gap in its ability to study arboreal fauna and to design nest boxes and other artificial cavities from real data.
Building the monitoring station
In 2023, after the birth of our first daughter, Wesley applied more than a decade of experience in electronics design and manufacturing to the problem. The result was the Comfy Creatures Nest Box Monitor, the first version of today's monitoring station: a purpose-designed, stand-alone camera and environmental sensing device that could be installed in nest boxes or natural hollows and deployed anywhere.
Interest in the proof of concept was immediate. Comfy Creatures and local bushcare groups applied for five grants together and won all five. Those grants delivered 60 pilot systems along public walking trails in South-East Queensland in 2025.
Eleanor Nielsen building nest boxes to test the beta Comfy Creatures Monitoring Stations, February 2025.
Today
There are now around 300 Comfy Creatures monitoring stations in the field, mostly in South-East Queensland. We design the station, the free Comfy Creatures Monitor app and the public Wildlife Dashboard ourselves. Our stations are used by councils, catchment and bushcare groups, schools, environmental organisations and ecological consultants across Queensland and into New South Wales, on public walking trails, on school grounds and in habitat restoration projects.
Our mission
To help stop the extinction of Australian fauna. Plenty of animals readily move into nest boxes, but there are many vulnerable arboreal species we don't yet know how to support with artificial tree cavities. The monitoring station and its open data help us learn what they need, and bring the wider community into their conservation.