Charles Eldermire here from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We've had hundreds of
thousands of people watching our bird cams and many of you are beginning to
know and recognize our special red-tailed hawk pair Big Red and Ezra as
they start a new family together. A lot of people have asked how we managed to
get a camera so close to their nest. The actual installation was no easy thing. To
start with we didn't pick an easy location.
The nest is 70 feet up a light tower high above Cornell's campus with no
nearby plugs or internet. In order to bring you the live feed
we had to beam wifi hundreds of meters to the roof of Bradfield Hall's
specially installed antennas. Making the hawk camera a reality wouldn't have been
possible without the hard work and ingenuity of a talented team of
scientists electricians and computer specialists.
This is Mark Dansker a producer in the Cornell Lab's multimedia program.
He's wearing a helmet camera that will give you a bird's eye view from 70 feet
above Cornell's athletic fields.
So no surprises so far?
Yeah I was really cold this morning!
This is an extremely untraditional installation.
Mark and the crew will be dealing with unpredictable weather high winds and
numbing temperatures. He will also need to be mindful of the Hawks. Cornell
ornithologists are ready with the radio to pull the installation team if the
birds show signs of disturbance like circling or dive bombing.
So we want to be at that pole.
We are going to do the installation all on that side.
Okay so the one spot for this camera
the thing is it's a wall mounted camera this is the wall mounted one so here's
what we're thinking.
That's pretty much out of his way right? Going to get a nice shot of him coming by.
That's right this is our nighttime camera. Can we go up a little bit?
Most nest cans only have one camera for the next being so inaccessible
we decided to install a backup camera and redundant microphones
The second camera has the added bonus of remote pan tilt zoom capability. So it's
gonna be half foot in. Perfect! That's perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect.
Despite Mark's assertions to just how perfect this was going to be
it turns out the overall installation took over three days.
While getting pristine live HD footage accompanied by amazing sound was a
direct result of our efforts, the real result will hopefully be connecting
people to birds.
As you can see it takes a whole lot to set up these cams and that's just the
beginning.
It's all made possible by the generous support of viewers and donors.
Thanks for your support and we'll see you online.