Birds of a feather

[Donna]

The millions glued to computers watching nature porn would agree that the allure is ‘real wildlife



“You feel like you get to know them,� Karen Bills of the Hancock Wildlife Federation says of the webcast eagles. “This is nature’s reality show.�

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon in March, 198 people watched a bald eagle sitting motionless in its nest. The viewers weren't outside though; likely they were equally still, sitting by themselves as three video cameras fed the inner lives of the eagle from British Columbia on to computer screens around the world.

The first shots of the Hornby Island nest came in 2006. Since then, 15 million people have watched these birds do, well, bird things. Television executives would kill for viewership like that.

The Hancock Wildlife Foundation website (hancockwildlife.org) broadcasts a live feed from the B.C. nests and has added other wildlife cams of bears and salmon.

People have watched eggs hatch and seen eaglets die. When the original Hornby Island nest cam got wiped out by a storm, biologist David Hancock stepped up to keep the feed running for existing viewers. A webcam was installed in a nest in Sidney, just north of Victoria. It soon had hits from around the world. "We had no idea," Hancock says. After getting enough bandwidth to handle the traffic and the cost to stream the video - remember this is pre-YouTube - Hancock became the founder of what is the most-watched website in the world.

The 2010 season is well underway and eyes from 43 countries are back on three pairs of eagles in Sidney on Vancouver Island and Delta, near Vancouver.

At the eagle nests, people watch as the birds renovate after they return in the fall from gorging on salmon. By January, they are sitting on eggs, with the male and female taking turns incubating and rolling them. Once they hatch, around the middle of April, the action increases as the adults are run ragged providing enough food to keep the growing chicks full of fish and roadkill.

The finale, of course, is when the season's young fly for the first time. People have travelled from England and Maine to stand under the nest to catch the first flight.

As an author, filmmaker and photographer, Hancock has spent 50 years interpreting the natural world in his books and films, but says he's never seen anything like the eagle-cam phenomenon. "What the hell are 343 people doing watching bald eagles from Australia?" he asks, laughing. Hancock doesn't call it nature porn, but the term has been used to describe the intimate nature of the footage coming out of the nests - and the addictive behaviour it creates in some of the nest-cam regulars.

Self-described eagleholics log in with nicknames such as Tweet Dreams and HikerBikerGram. Some are scientists and some are insomniacs. Many get hooked. "There are people that that's all they do," says Terry Baker, from Coquitlam, B.C. She's known on the forums as terrytvgal. Her signature says, "I came for the eagles, and stayed for the friends I made." She watches daily from about 2:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. or later, much later. She thought she might have a problem when she found herself turning down dinner invitations because she didn't want to miss anything on the nest. "I just really got captivated," she says.

It's not just for her viewing pleasure that she's so dedicated. Because the audience is global, people in different time zones monitor the video streams in shifts and post updates on discussion forums. When people wake up in different parts of the world, they can catch up on what they've missed.

Hancock thinks the eagle cams reach an audience jaded by the highly produced footage typical of nature programming. "We always know it's canned and edited," he says. The nest footage, transmitted 24/7 from a grainy webcam being blown about in the wind is the antithesis of Discovery Channel fodder. "It's the real wildlife," he says.

"It may be that the bloody animal will sleep for four hours," Hancock says. Those moments of sheer boredom add to the connection the viewers have with the birds. Like human life, it's rarely glamourous. Most of the time, it's just sitting on a couple of eggs. But Hancock says he's learned more from watching the nest cams than he did over 40 years standing on the ground looking up at nests.

Foundation co-ordinator Karen Bills lurked on the nest cam site when she first discovered it in 2006. She would read forum comments and watch the eagles, but didn't post her own thoughts.

Now, she's as immersed in the eagle cams as anyone. She volunteers full-time with the Hancock Wildlife Federation. "You feel like you get to know them," Bills explains. "This is nature's reality show."

Unlike carefully scripted reality TV, here, viewers never know what's going to happen.

Last May, people watched in horror as a female eagle killed her chick. The bizarre accident involved an entanglement of the eaglet in the mother's tail feathers. As she tried to detach herself, the chick was inadvertently pushed over the rim of the nest and fell to its death.

Brian Starzomski, a community ecologist at the University of Victoria, admits he's no expert on wildlife voyeurism, but he can't see any harm in the nest cams. "It's certainly nice when people are engaged with nature," he says.

He points out that viewing wildlife on computers opens doors for people who couldn't, or wouldn't, otherwise access a nest site. Having millions of viewers online also means less traffic into sensitive areas and disruption of the nesting birds.

As for the rampant anthropomorphism on the discussion forums - viewers call the adults ma and pa and make all kinds of comparisons to human couples - Starzomski doesn't see any harm in it.

While researchers must take care to remain as objective as possible when working with animals, Starzomski doesn't think it's a big issue with the public. "It probably indicates more of a love of the organism or animals," he says. There's no better way to engage people than on the basis of love, he adds, and that can only make conservation efforts easier.

Besides, what man can't relate as he watches the male eagle carefully place a stick in the nest, only to have the female take it out and poke it into what is obviously a better place?