Bird Cams Around the World

CCB is planning a trip to Cobb Island this weekend to fix the tower and set up new cams. If all works out, they should be broadcasting shortly.

CCB just published their quarterly newsletter today. There has been increasing concern about peregrines hunting endangered shorebirds that nest on the remote islands around Cobb. As a result, they have removed several of the towers initially installed to hack falcons in the 1980's.

The attached articles references Metompkin, which was very close to Cobb, and another with a study on the impact of falcons on endangered Red Knots.
http://www.ccb-wm.org/news/2009_SeptDec/MetompkinTower.html
http://www.ccb-wm.org/news/2009_SeptDec/conservation_conflict.html

Thank you, Kitten--I'm going to look right now!

Wow, it's so wonderful to have the Cobb cams back up and running. I checked in several times today, but didn't catch a falcon at home . . . yet! But the weather hasn't been great, and there's still lots of time!

Cobb is back...stuck on 2/25/10, 10:09 am....

Hi folks,

I wanted to take a moment to thank the BCAW members for their incredible support for the cameras on Cobb island. We wouldn't have been able to do the repairs needed after that devastating nor'easter that destroyed the camera equipment without BCAW.

Last Sunday, a few of us from CCB boated out to the island with goals to repair the camera equipment and a few broken support beams on the nest platform. The island is 10 miles from the closest boat ramp. With a boat fully loaded with lumber, solar panels, batteries, and tools, we slipped up a tidal creek and were able to unload the equipment close to the nest tower. 8 hours later we'd done all the repairs we could, but we were unable to see if the cameras were working. The video signal is normally beamed wirelessly from the island to a tower closer to the mainland and then to a web server hosted by University of Virginia's Long Term Ecological Research station in Oyster, VA. Unfortunately, the server has been crashing the past week, and wasn't running when we were at the nest tower. We patiently waited a few days and now we can see that cameras 3 and 4 are fine but camera 2 needs to be adjusted. Hopefully, we can fix that on our next trip out to the tower in April.

When we were at the nest on Sunday, we saw no sign of the adult peregrines. Shawn did spot a female perched on the tower earlier this week when he was looking at the camera. If you guys can keep an eye out for the pair and check for band colors/codes, that would be wonderful! Thanks!

A few photos of the expedition:
The tower before repairs.

Shawn and I on the tower. All the camera equipment is now on top of the tower and safe from storm surge.

Bart hoisting a beam for Shawn to nail in place.


Libby

Thanks so much for the update, Libby, & for all you have done to get these cams working again!

No...I'll send Libby a note.

Hey Cobb fans -

We know the web server has been crashing the past week. The person who can fix it is in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia (a 4 hour trip to the Eastern Shore). UVA's web server relays the falcon camera signal to a web server. We are totally dependent on them to broadcast our signal so we just have to wait it out until it can get fixed. They anticipate it should be in the next 2 weeks. Thanks for your patience!

Also, I don't have access to zoom the camera out yet, but hopefully we can make that happen in the next day. It totally make sense to leave it zoomed out so we can see perched adults on the corners of the tower outside the nest box. Last year the pair laid the first egg on March 24 so we've got a bit of time to get all the camera and server issues dealt with before the action starts.

Libby