Hello everyone over long time. I just want to share with You result of
very interesting project. This is live stream feed from nest of Black
Stork(Ciconia nigra) (mms://video.eenet.ee/kurg) which is located in deep woods in middle Estonia.
This is actually first open video feed about living being who doesn't
tolerate human closeness at all.

one more time straight link to feed:
mms://video.eenet.ee/kurg

Please give me some feedback!

Nothing much happened for the 7 minutes I watched the nest, Frank. The adult preened quite a bit but while the image was sizeable the plumage detail was generally vague and from shoulders down it was just black without contrast.
The chick(s) did move but it might have been a clump of cotton-wool for want of detail.

Black storks are rare and shy but I would have to be getting better quality images to find the patience to keep shooting or viewing ...

To me, the point of view, level of detail, and screen area are very good. Well done! While its not HD or even SD quality, I see a fair level of detail combined with smooth motion. I would much rather look at this image than a larger image that wasn't realtime- or even a highly detailed photo in a book. I remember seeing many different kinds of cams like this several years ago that would update every minute at most, so I think this is excellent- especially for a casual viewer or even a bird watching enthusiast. Even though some may consider this a "low quality" image, there are definitely people out there like myself who don't have the capability to see this particular bird in its natural habitat (unless its also native to Alaska- and I haven't seen any of these!).

However, with today's current level of technology and consumer prices, I don't think its realistic to expect a drastic increase in detail simply because of the added bandwidth it would require. Several Internet providers already put a monthly bandwidth cap on their customers, and I don't think most people would want to watch their 10GB quota get eaten up by the second while they watch a few minutes of a bird preening.

Yeah, it's like uncutted reality show where You just can't find
very tight action schedule. But they certainly have some of their own
life highlights as humans have. And i'm sure some of those are
very exciting and very informative to see. Everybody waited for
example hatching but unfortunately our camera turned dead and
thisone is totally lost for us. In other and it was fortune, because
the first camera gave very bad image. Now we have there Mobotix M22 (http://www.mobotix.com/eng_GB/products/m22m_camera_series)
this is completely different level. Certainly there is coming lots
of events, i'm not bird scientist so i can't point them out too much
but as i imagine one of major upcoming event would be learning to
fly and leaving the nest.

In Estonia it became like national soapopera. Some days statistics
give about 9000 hits from different unique IP-s from inside Estonia.
Plus some thousands from outside. Like from Finland, Germany, US.

When we had there first bigger suspension(a couple of days). We
started to receive very angry mails and phonecalls like who You
cheating here and for what we pay our domestic internet connection
if we don't see this feed. :)


Image quality that Mobotix gives is actually very good and sound
as well is very good. But we still have problems there, because
of very high natural contrast in woods enviroment. So we definately
can't use auto-brightness and auto-contrast. Because camera can't
evaluate it correctly and result is that relativley bright chicks
go to white-clipping. But if You use there manual setting You definatly
experiencing problems in different daytime.
So if anybody has some automate solve for that let me know.... Maybe
some webcams support like auto-brightness for predefined area....?
...or like scripting support to drive given values.

just to make difference who is who. The Male Stork(his name is Tooni) is radio transmitter attached to the leg and the Female(Donna) is w/o attachments.

mother brought a snake to nest. It was unbelivable how she ate the rest left from chicks. She just swallowed all together.

Frank,

Great quality and with all the rain we are currently getting in Hong Kong, it is something enjoyable to watch

Bob

Frank,

You mentioned that the nest is in the middle of some woods, I am just wondering how you are getting the video signal out.

Do you have a related website giving any further facts together with past screen shots.

Thanks

Bob

One word: Awesome!

We have something similar here in Atlanta, the panda cam from the zoo - http://www.zooatlanta.org/animals_panda_cam.php4.

Of course, it's only similar... nothing compared to your feed from the wild life.

Thanks for kind words Bob and Ervin.

..and about link. It`s 5GHz wireless(802.11a) link implemented with Mikrotik(mikrotik.com) devices. Camera-side device is located on the top of fir-tree(30m high). This is out of Stork sight to preserve possibility to change it without disturbing Stork. Wireless link is about 5km`s long to the nearest accesspoint(80m high mobile tower). Which is provided local internet company(www.kernel.ee). This network transports single stream to the video-proxy server(provided by www.eenet.ee). This is the point actually client node accesses(about 50km`s away from nest).
So webcam is not actual point where You can access. Just because it can stand at most two simultaneous connections. Because of bottleneck first link(usable bandwith reaches to 9Mbps) and because of webcam http server perfomance. Actual output network bandwith is about 200Mbps in the daytime which is direct concern of proxy.

Thanks Frank for the detailed reply, I am still amazed at the quality even in the middle of the night

Bob

For those interested there is a web site with additional info and a diary

http://www.ilm.ee/~uploader/loodus/?leht=art07engtoonipaevik

PS: Frank, does the camera have a zoom lens as we now seem to have a closer shot of the nest

Bob we have here relatively lighty nights at the moment here. This could be reason why image is in acceptable condition. But right now is here(gmt +2) 23.30 before midnight. And camera turned itself into nightvision mode and it`s not so enjoyable as time around the dawn. Today we have here clouds in the sky so night is relatively darker as well.

But interesting statistics about last week is here:

Summary Stats
-+---------------+-----------------------
| Detail|Value
-+---------------+-----------------------
1|Hits |31855
2|Bandwidth |3417.18 GB
3|Unique IPs |8612
7|Referring Sites|37
8|Referrers |47
9|Countries |43
-+---------------+-----------------------

Countries
--+-----+----------+-------+-----------------------
| Hits| Bandwidth|Avg.sec|Country
--+-----+----------+-------+-----------------------
1|23991|2891.52 GB| 0|Estonia
2| 3417| 141.01 GB| 0|Poland
3| 1055| 65.68 GB| 0|Germany
4| 589| 45.71 GB| 0|United States
5| 541| 45.00 GB| 0|Hungary
6| 464| 60.71 GB| 0|Finland
7| 358| 30.33 GB| 0|Slovakia
8| 283| 11.08 GB| 0|Canada
9| 226| 36.95 GB| 0|Sweden
10| 154| 25.99 GB| 0|United Kingdom
11| 130| 10.91 GB| 0|Czech Republic
12| 105| 13.94 GB| 0|Netherlands
13| 87| 6.59 GB| 0|France
14| 61| 712.50 MB| 0|Belgium
15| 60| 1.43 GB| 0|Hong Kong
16| 43| 5.94 GB| 0|Denmark
17| 38| 1.51 GB| 0|Ireland
18| 37| 2.67 GB| 0|Italy
19| 37| 1.77 GB| 0|Lithuania
20| 27| 6.05 GB| 0|Luxembourg
21| 25| 411.20 MB| 0|Switzerland
22| 19| 660.43 MB| 0|Russian Federation
23| 17| 1.80 GB| 0|Latvia
24| 16| 108.79 MB| 0|Japan
25| 16| 970.66 MB| 0|Liechtenstein
26| 11| 4.55 GB| 0|Norway
27| 10| 598.74 MB| 0|Austria
28| 4| 4.01 MB| 0|N/A
29| 4| 618.94 MB| 0|Europe
30| 4| 9.70 MB| 0|Peru
31| 4| 22.29 MB| 0|Portugal
32| 4| 3.43 MB| 0|Cambodia
33| 3| 17.00 MB| 0|Bhutan
34| 3| 2.19 MB| 0|China
35| 2| 61.40 MB| 0|Australia
36| 2| 1.83 GB| 0|Greece
37| 2| 70.95 MB| 0|Ukraine
38| 1| 6.23 MB| 0|Bahrain
39| 1| 17.29 MB| 0|Israel
40| 1| 7.08 MB| 0|Spain
41| 1| 6.37 MB| 0|Turkey
42| 1| 335.16 KB| 0|Moldova, Republic of
43| 1| 3.83 MB| 0|Bosnia and Herzegovina
--+-----+----------+-------+-----------------------
|31855|3417.18 GB| -|Total
--+-----+----------+-------+-----------------------

I love this thing.
Awsome.

PS: Frank, does the camera have a zoom lens as we now seem to have a closer shot of the nest

Sorry, Bob, just slipped over Your question. But no, camera does not have remote(neither manual) optical zoom neither remote focus(thisone is manual) capability. But this isn't digital zoom as well. We just use camera's CCD windowing capability. Which means camera captures only predefined part of image which lays currently on CCD. So resolution still actual(no software/digital zoom) but it is part of much bigger image(in pixel count and in AOV).

It is happening now!
If anybody can see it right now. They put ring marks around chicks legs.!!!

wow, those chicks have grown since i last checked this out...very cool.

There was a person just up on the nest weighing the chicks and taking DNA (I think), I missed if he banded the chicks. According to the diary they would be banding the chicks.

Great video, I loved the shots of the weighing

Bob

PS: I forgot to mention that some fish was left for the chicks

recording of yesterday's Live is here: mms://video.eenet.ee/tooni/rongastamine.asf

The man in the nest is ornitholog Urmas Sellis. He the person who arranged whole this live feed thing. He speaks estonian. He's first word were something like:"It's very hard to keep balance here because i am standing with both legs only on one branch ... so if i dissapear from the picture that means i couldn't keep right balance". So his speech was full humour.
enjoy!

Nothing much happened for the 7 minutes I watched the nest, Frank. The adult preened quite a bit but while the image was sizeable the plumage detail was generally vague and from shoulders down it was just black without contrast.
The chick(s) did move but it might have been a clump of cotton-wool for want of detail.

Black storks are rare and shy but I would have to be getting better quality images to find the patience to keep shooting or viewing ...

I would have to agree with Brendan on this one...

I would have to agree with Brendan on this one...

Really can`t cheer up You guys about this subject. That`s the nature! Of course we could create some artificial suspense, but that is really not the aim of this project. The main purpose is maybe mostly scientific - to learn habits of creatures who keep long distance from human. The second purpose is maybe that it is very much reality show and available for everybody.

But... after storks leaving their nest to head to south in the fall, i hope we cut some short best of of this summer.

Learning to fly megamix (mms://video.eenet.ee/tooni/2007-07-16.asf)

Nice footage, Frank, and much more interesting. I'd still edit it down to only a fraction of the long megamix and chuck in some fades between clips or changing light conditions (to prevent hard cuts). Place in some soft music and interesting background narrative about the birds and it will be a winner.

I would have liked to have seen higher quality imagery, and maybe at least one or two different camera angles. If you were unable to reset the camera position, it can be helpful to use a wireless remote control to zoom the lens wide and then tight to take in different viewpoints of the same subject (depending on your camera model of course).

At 1208pm 30th July (Hong Kong time +8GMT) I was fortunate enough to see the second Black stork chick leave the nest, there is now just one lone chick gathering up the courage to fly.

Thanks to all those involved in the project for supplying such marvelous pictures and sound

Bob Thompson

Surprise, Surprise, it is now 1945 HK time (+8 GMT) and the 2 chicks that flew off this morning are now back on the nest - total 3 in the nest

Bob

Bob, You`re really lucky. I`ve never catch them flying "live". But recordings are here (mms://video.eenet.ee/tooni/2007-08-01.asf).

one of three chicks is lost second week already. He seemes to be dead.

So, this is the end for this year. Tooni(male stork) is some hunderds kilometers away from Estonia. He got new radio transmitter, so we will trace it whole winter. Chick will stay close for awhile. They fly now fluently.
Learning to fly (mms://video.eenet.ee/tooni/2007-08-01.asf). So thanks everyone for being interested. I hope this project will continue next spring. Just a little before storks arrive to the nest.