May 16, 2006

NestCam: My Own In-house National Geo-esque Special

A couple of weeks ago I was in the attic messing with an old server I was using to rescue a hard drive my Mom brought back from her last trip to Haiti. The drive belonged to a hospital down there that she works with frequently... but that's another story (and has a happy ending, I'm proud to add).

While I was up there, I became acutely aware of the harsh scolding I was getting from a wren hopping around in the rafters. Nothing says "beat it, interloper!" like a peeved Wren giving you the business.

Knowing this meant there was a nest, I went back downstairs for a bit only to creep back more silently so I could hear the peeping of the babies. They were taking Mom (or Dad's) clue to stay quiet during my previous visit and the parent wasn't giving away the location of the nest while I was being so crass as to invade my own attic. Following the sounds, I found a rather elaborate nest built in the corner of a sideboard with a hutch that was retired to the attic a few years ago after Elisabeth declared it a monstrosity not fit for human eyes.

In it were four little scowling baby wrens (wrenlings? wrenlets?) giving me the evil eye. Naturally, my first reaction (due to being born with raging geek genes) was to piece together the necessary webcam to broadcast this to the world.

A clamp-on light with X-10 remote control (so I could turn it on and off from downstairs), tripod, Sony DV cam and Linux-based, BT848 capture-card endowed server later... I started broadcasting my in-house, National Geographic-esque nature video from the attic. I never got around to doing a breathy, Attenborough-like voice over (actually, I didn't do audio at all)... but it did the job.

The server was fairly ancient, bordering on steam powered... but it had enough oomph to get the job done at a low resolution. I used Fedora Core 5 running VLC to encode the video into an MPEG4 stream where I could tap into it and do local recordings of segments on my Powerbook and convert them to Quicktime.

I've assembled a collection of videos here to share. The quality isn't stellar, but it's usable and the files aren't overly large.

I also learned a great deal about wrens in the process. For instance, I was just beginning to ponder how it was they kept a nest clean with four little birds and a never-ending stream of big juicy bugs being stuffed down their throats. I watched in horrified fascination as that answer presented itself one morning... twice in quick succession. Don't be eating when you watch it, but it's rather fascinating (and described pretty decently here - I set Google aflame looking for a description of what I had witnessed and found it on a site about baby Robins).

A handful of friends and family tapped into the live stream while it was running last week. My iChat was humming with discussions about nestcam (Mom declared it more interesting than Tivo... MJ made it her lunchtime entertainment several days in a row). Without further ado, here are some recordings I made showing key stages throughout the process:

Click on each picture to watch the associated video.

	This is the first recording I made with one parent arriving to feed them. They are fairly young here and you'll see the parent consuming the sac mentioned on this site.
	This clip shows both parents arriving at the same time to feed. This answered one question I had when I read that the male often does the feeding because the female is already on another nest. Apparently that wasn't the case here. The question remains whether they are raising another brood or two over the coming months (which Wrens frequently do, apparently).
	This is the infamous "housekeeping" video that answers how the nest is kept clean. It's mildly horrifying and will undoubtedly appeal to kids of all ages (eliciting squeals of horrified delight). Details on understanding what you're seeing are available here.
	Empty Nest Syndrome begins here. :) A few days into peep-watching, I noticed they were starting to hang out on the "front porch" of the nest. I figured flight was a few days away. As it turns out, flight was about two hours later and they all left the nest over a span of about seven minutes (including one taking off over my shoulder when I went up to see if the first one had fallen off the shelf or flown away). I edited this down to around two minutes, so it has some jump-cuts in it.

The little buggers spent the next 24 hours getting flight training in the attic. Three of them got lost in the stairwell and drove the cat nuts (since he could hear them peeping just on the other side of the door but couldn't actually see them). I carefully ferried each of them back up into the attic where they perched on my finger for a bit and looked around before hopping off and disappearing among boxes and furniture. The parents, of course, flew around and cursed at me the entire time... it was a thankless job. :)

They have since left and, I imagine, are winging around the yard as we speak.

Enjoy!
- Aaron