Watching birds raise young online
FOUR peregrine falcon chicks huddle together into what looks like a single ball of fuzz, a breeze puffing up their feathers.
These are baby falcons. All around them are the remains of their dinner: The bones and feathers of pigeons that they’ve torn apart and eaten.
Some 2,600 people tuned from their computers at home each day to watch the baby birds while they snuggled, ate and eventually grew too big for the nest. This was part of a project started two decades ago, to place a webcam in the falcons’ nest.
The falcon chicks lived with their parents in a nest in the tower of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Heidelberg, Germany, located 65m above sea level, their activities captured by three cameras trained on them around the clock.
The chicks had a huge fan base, with viewers from as far afield as China, Australia, the United States, Belgium and Poland.
Hans-martin Gaeng, who runs the project, says followers are fascinated by the fact that the chicks feed only on other birds.
Some 20 years ago, Gaeng, a former teacher who is now retired, fitted a nesting box into the listed tower in Heidelberg with his students.
Peregrine falcons usually breed in rock faces, but will settle in other places as long as they are sufficiently high.
A pair of birds have come to breed in the tower every year since, hatching a total of 65 young.
This year, the female laid her eggs at the end of February. On April 6, the first chick emerged from its shell. The baby bird and its siblings left the nest at the end of May.
Gaeng is a fan of the streaming technology, saying: “It allows people to enjoy wild animals without disturbing them or harming their natural environments.”
It can also trigger voyeuristic tendencies, according to Roland Borgards, a literary scholar from Frankfurt University who focuses on the role of animals in culture and literature.
“You’re watching something that is not actually meant for you to see,” he says.
The creatures often provoke strong feelings on the part of the viewer, from disgust and horror, to awe. There are also parallels to human coexistence, he says, with family relationships spanning love, dedication and violence.
Webcams allow a proximity that would otherwise be impossible, says Borgards. “I can’t just climb into the nest of a kestrel,” he says. Viewing the world through the screen of a computer is a phenomenon that is common in today’s world, he adds.
“These days, moments of communication between animals and people tend to be characterised by an incredible distance,” Borgards says.
The cat videos so popular among netizens are a whole different thing – with their own dramaturgy, he says. The films are edited and staged much more effectively than live recordings; the main characters are cultural products, pets transformed into actors.
When the chicks aren’t tearing pigeons apart for their lunch, little tends to happen in the falcons’ nest.
“There’s something meditative about that,” says Borgards. “It’s a real contrast to the media world, which is all about speed.”
Viewers follow this lack of activity with some devotion.
“I know people who will sit and watch for two hours,” says Friedemann Tewald, who works for the Nabu nature protection association.
His local chapter in Fellbach also runs a webcam trained on falcons in a high-rise office building in the Rems-murr district.
For watchers, “it’s like television,” he says.
Many users also keep the browser window open while they are at work and take a look now and again.
Sometimes these home movies don’t have happy endings, however.
In Berlin’s Hermsdorfer See, Nabu set up a camera in the nesting box of a couple of tawny owls. Before they could hatch, a raccoon came along in late March and ate the eggs, to the horror of viewers.