A small minority of Barbadians are responsible for shooting up to 45,000
migrating waders (shorebirds) every year between August and November in
Barbados, West Indies. These birds breed in North America, sometimes as far North as the Arctic, and then migrate South to spend the winter in Latin America. En route they fly over Barbados.

The slaughter on Barbados is highly organized and takes place in a number of shallow, man-made lakes, which are made attractive to exhausted migrating waders. The lakes have up to 4 acres of open water with specially built mud banks within range of the shooting hut. Caged birds (maimed from last years' shoot) are placed close to the mud banks and the hunters use whistles to imitate the bird calls, which are supplemented by amplified recording calls to attract entire flocks. Decoys are also used.

On July 12, 2007, about 30 of us gathered on the road beside the field where the Sidney cameras are. It was time for the eaglet, now named Skye, to become a Fledgling by taking its first flight.

Please visit the Sidney BC Bald Eagle Nest topic in our Discussion forum for pictures and lots of observations on this historic event.

Skye fledged this past week and is spending less and less time in the Sidney nest. The eagle cam season is winding down for 2007 but don't go away, there are lots of things still ongoing and more to come.

The whole "Story of the River" cycle includes fish, bears, orcas and of course eagles - as well as a host of other species and concerns that together depict the cycle of nature in and around the rivers of the world. These are the lifeblood of the continents and it is our intention to bring you to an understanding of the cycle of this lifeblood through our cameras and other aspects of Hancock Wildlife Foundation. We're only just getting started. Come on along with us on this exciting adventure.

David and I have been talking quite a bit over the past weeks about a number of things, not the least of which is our need to get cameras into nests and do maintenance on the ones already there during the brief period when the eagles are gone. Much of this will depend on your donations, personal as well as corporate, and on other things in the works, but I expect that it will be a mad dash to do as much as possible with what we have for now.

In the mean time, despite the current network problem I feel confident that we'll be bringing you a full season of salmon spawning and eagle feeding in the Goldstream Estuary. Bob Chappell and Darren Copley have been working to get the underwater camera back online on the intertidal channel. In the mean time the bats will be back in the attic and with the infrared lights there those of you outside North America in timezones that are awake while the rest of us are asleep will be treated to their antics at night here.

We're also working hard to get similar cameras into a river near Vancouver where literally thousands of eagles feed in the late Fall and early Winter. By the time they start to tail off in Febrary, it will again be time to watch our birds nest-build in the nests for the new season. Bob and Darren were testing the new camera in 50' of water at the Goldstream Marina last week - passed with flying colors.

Read on for details...

People from all over the world have been watching events unfold at the Peregrine Falcon Nest in Noord Brabant, The Netherlands, via the Live Streaming Video. Two cameras were installed in February, 2007: one inside and one outside the nest box.

Three eggs were laid. Before they were hatched, a female falcon entered the nest while the father was brooding the eggs. He flew away, she inspected the eggs, then left, never to be seen again. The three chicks hatched April 14 and 15. On April 22 another female falcon arrived and attacked the mother. The fight began at the nest box and continued in the woods a short distance away. The mother was driven from the nest and possibly mortally wounded because she did not return. The father then took over the responsibilities of feeding and raising the chicks by himself. The chicks were 7 and 8 days old, much too young to be without a mother.

It has been a hectic April and it's not over yet.

First of all I want to appologize to those trying hard to view the cameras through our Windows Media server. We have had to cap the amount of traffic it can put out due to the cost of the link. At the current cap it should easily handle about 90 simultaneous viewers but has at times had over 300 trying to share its link. This has nothing to do with how capable the actual server is - it is capable of serving well in excess of 3000 simultaneos sessions if we opened up the flood-gates (network bandwidth) but at that rate it would be costing the foundation something over $10,000/month which we simply don't have at the moment. We're looking for sponsors to step up to the plate, and the advertising revenue is starting to climb, but it appears that this simply won't happen in time for the onslaught we expect once chicks appear.

In fact, we've pretty much known this all along - that we were caught in a catch-22 situation where the ad revenue wouldn't rise unless more people could view, and more people couldn't view until the revenue rose to pay for the added bandwidth - so we've been working on several fronts to address this.

Hancock Wildlife Foundation is pleased to announce that Neokast Media Network has accepted our cameras as a major part of their beta test for their new peer to peer video streaming service.

David Hancock and I recently met with many of the Neokast people at the Voice/Video on the Net show in San Jose (March 20-22) and came away with an agreement that we would be amongst the first content providers in their roll-out. Since then we've been working with them almost daily to get things in place.

Starting the week of April 2nd, Neokast began adding testers (your truly included) to their system in a staged roll-out of their services. I've had a stream from their facility up and live almost continuously since April 5th, and it has worked flawlessly.

As of April 7, 2007, our administrative people were added to the list, and as they gained experience over the next couple of days we added our moderators, then some of our members.

As of today, April 17th, we are opening up the Neokast viewer (install here) to all members of our www.hancockwildlifechannel.org site and have opened up the Neokast discussion topic to all members of our discuss.hancockwildlifechannel.org site.

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March 15, 2007 - Replay

The replay times are the best times to really get a feel for what has happened during the day. You can fast-forward, pause, rewind and scan through the archive files for the day.

Sidney

The replay of the Sidney Wide camera is dark for the first 9 hours and 41 minutes - but shows a wonderful sunrise shortly after that point. The Close-up (CU) camera starts its day at about 09:06 into the file. Use the slider bar just under the image area to slide almost half-way through the file.

Today the scuttlebutt is that there is a second egg in the nest. We'll have to wait for David Hancock to review the video and decide if this is a fact. Check out the discussion forum "2007 Sidney Nest Discussion" for today for thoughts and such.

You'll also find that the "Egg Turning Frequency" discussion group has started up again. Lots of old and new friends here.

The audio on the cameras is incredible - lots of background bird noises, although the occasional plane or car going by can be a bit distracting at times.