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Raven mad

Online birdwatching, care of NorthwesTel

MIRIAM HILL

NorthwesTel’s popular Raven Cam is back in action online.

Internet surfers can type in a URL and watch a raven’s nest, snuggled into the crossbeams of a microwave radio tower in the Yukon, from a high-resolution camera mounted eight feet above it.

Using a high-speed Internet connection and a streaming server, real-time live video footage of the action in the nest can be seen by people all over the world.

Viewers from Singapore, South Africa and even New Zealand visited the site last year making up some of the 40,000 hits the site received in one month alone.

Angela Ferro, marketing communications manager for NorthwesTel, says the Canadian Wildlife Service approached the company last year with the idea, and the telecommunications company provided the group with the equipment and the medium with which to do it.

"We thought it was pretty fun," she says. "There’s not much known about ravens so last year the CWS got to compile a lot of information from the logbook, so we thought it would be a good initiative. It became so popular we decided to do it again this year."

The same ravens have set up home base in the nest again this year, right in front of the camera.

"We left up the camera [all year] and just happened to notice that they were fooling around a couple of weeks ago. They built that in five days," she says referring to the nest visible on the computer monitor. "They’ve been putting in some fuzzy stuff and we have no idea what it is, whether it’s from the dump or something, but they’ve been stacking it full of it. It looks like cotton balls."

Beside the window that changes its picture every few seconds, viewers can choose to look at the logbook of messages left by others, or add a message of their own.

Ferro says she has had requests for a timeline of what happened last year in terms of nest building and chick-hatchings so she posted a schedule of events, which she points out, have followed through closely again this year.

"In general within a few days of what will happen," she says. "They’ve been right on the mark with their schedule."

It is a bit hard to see what exactly is happening in the fluffy material stuffed into the nest, but when a raven is in the nest its movements and manipulation of the nest sticks are clearly visible.

One of the more recent logbook notes suggests there was a chick in the nest, but the viewer wasn’t sure and asked for the opinion of other watchers.

Nora Boekhout of Vancouver, B.C., writes her husband heard about the site on the radio.

"We have just been watching one of the ravens flying in and out, and working on the nest. Fantastic!" she writes. "I can hardly wait to show my Grade 2 class after the Easter weekend!

Wilhelm Schickgramm directs others "hooked on" Internet bird watching to check out a site devoted to live streaming video of storks in Germany, and Stuart Hogg suggests NorthwesTel invest in a Buffalo Cam.

"We have the capabilities of doing a couple of Web cams," Ferro says, and people are encouraged to offer suggestions on the Web site. "But we’re just trying to do it little by little. Last year was our first run at it. We may be able to do one in Nunavut, maybe one in the Northwest Territories too."

Next year, if the ravens co-operate and hold off on nest building until a little later in the season, Net watchers may get to hear what is happening in the nest too.

"We were going to put up a unidirectional microphone so we could stream the audio and the video," Ferro says, "but we didn’t get a chance to do that this year."

Raven Cam can be accessed by going to NorthwesTel’s Web site, www.nwtel.ca, and following the Raven Cam link.

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