Birdwatching, CIA Style

Last summer, a robin made a nest above a porch light by my back door. I set up a webcam stream to watch her, and it blew up, with hundreds/thousands of people tuning in to watch her chicks hatch and grow. People even took to naming the brood, and mourning the loss of Elliot, the youngest of the four fledglings, as he fell out of the nest to his demise on the cement below. It was an interesting distraction, and once all the birds had grown and left the nest, it sat vacant until a couple weeks ago.

Now, there is a house finch that has built her own smaller nest inside the abandoned robin's nest and laid four eggs of her own. So of course, I took it upon myself to put the webcam back up, and start a stream. Now I'm here to share it with everyone here, just as I did on Fxhome last year.

Here is a link to the stream!

This bird's name is Donna Barkley, and her mate is called Greg Williams. I'm using an HD webcam with audio. Edit: Stream updated, now it's streaming in high quality, so you can actually tell where the bird ends and the nest begins. I'll keep updating the thread as long as folks are interested.

Enjoy watching nature!

Why Donna Barkley?

Because that's her name. I don't make these decisions.

The robin's name was Patrick Sinclair Washington Jones III. Go figure.

Very cool. Is that a Foscam? Do you have PTZ?

It's just a Windows live HD webcam. It does have PTZ, but it's all digital, so I don't really use it. Right now it's actually zoomed in slightly, so that might be the reason for the lower quality.

The quality is good, don't disturb the birdie.

Luckily, I can make all my adjustments without even going outside.

Ps. Turns out all I had to do was tell ustream to stream in high quality. It looks much better now.

No birdie at night.

Yeah, no night vision, unfortunately. And I don't want to put up a lamp out there, because I don't know how the birds would react to having a light on them all night.

Hey, you scared the birdie with the zooming!

There was no zooming. I don't know what you're on about.

I remember watching this last year! Glad to hear we'll get to watch another bird this year!

This one might be a bust, unfortunately. I suspect that the bird has abandoned the nest, because I haven't seen her on the eggs for at least a couple of days. There is a robin that's been hanging around the house, living in another nest that's harder to get to, so it could be that the finches were scared away by the robin, or neighborhood cats (there are a LOT of cats around my house), or something else.

I'm going to leave the stream up for another few days just in case something happens, but it's very likely that the birds aren't going to come back. Just wanted to let anyone watching know!

I got bushwhacked in another post, so haven't seen it lately.

There are more bushwhackings in your future, I'm sure of it.

I'm bored again. Got any chips & salsa?

I might have to cook up some BBQ this weekend, but I don't have anything marinated ready.

Yawn