This thread is intended to provide general background information on the Sidney eagles observed on our web cam. People are welcome to ask questions of general interest here, with the understanding that we may incorporate the answer into one of the opening posts and delete the question to keep the thread short and easy to review.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

Reserved for general information about the nest and area, to be copied from the old forum.

Reserved for additional general information

"Why Can't You Clean the Cam?"

As many of you have noticed, Solo has been quite accurate in her attempts to hit the cam with her poop shots. I think all of us wish we could just pop up there and clean the lens, possibly gently relocating Charlotte the spider in the process.

Unfortunately we can't do that for two reasons.

First, the law in BC is very clear that one cannot interfere with active bald eagle nests, even with the best of intentions.

Second, it has been David Hancock's experience throughout a lifetime of working with eagles and other raptors in British Columbia, that when people go into an active nest, the eagles will not return to that nest the following year.

We all know a number of nests in the United States where scientists routinely enter the nest to band the eaglets without causing the eagles to abandon the nest once the eaglets have fledged. However, David knows of many more in BC that were abandoned after people visited the nest to assess and/or band the eaglets. As this nest is in BC, David considers it likely that it would follow the same pattern that he has seen at every nest in BC where he banded an eaglet in his younger days - the eagles would raise their young, and once the eaglets fledged, they'd abandon a perfectly good nest and build a new nest, not necessarily at as prime a location, and often giving up a year of nesting to get set up in their new location.

It is indeed possible that these eagles are more used to seeing people than some of those David encountered during the days he was involved with banding, and possible that they might not abandon the nest if we were able to get the necessary permits, get permission from the landowner to enter the site, raise the $1000 or so it costs to rent the giant crane, etc to access the nest to clean the cam. But it's not a chance David, or Hancock Wildlife, is willing to take.

"Can't You Do Something about Those Blue/Yellow Vertical Stripes?"

Short answer - probably not.

Longer answer, Richard watched for a while and noticed that "the pattern looks almost as if something is shining in through the lens and refracting off something (like the CCD mask, based on the colors) which would explain why it is both intermittent and roughly the same time each day - could be some shiny thing moving in the wind a bit and catching the sun at just the right angle."

It now seems to be appearing twice a day rather than once a day - which may have to do with the changes in the angle of the sun and the things it might bounce off of.

He also said that "the pattern seems to start on the left and "bleed" to the right, then back again as it disappears. It does not go off/on "snap" - it fades in and out. If I were a betting man I'd say it is at the camera, not in the electronics and wire from there to the encoder, and not in the encoder."

We have tried restarting the encoder, and that doesn't help - the image coming from the cam to the encoder has the lines. As mentioned in the answer to the previous question, if the problem is in the camera, we won't be able to deal with it until Solo has fledged and the eagles have all gone north for the salmon run.

There is another possible explanation, which beans discovered - click here for details - it makes as much sense as most of the other explanations I've seen, and is a lot more fun.