Our hummingbird feeder(s) are watched by people all over the United States and probably all over the world. The hummingbirds arrive in March. We hang the feeder up in mid-March when the flowers on the reserve start to bloom and the insects start to swarm. The feeder is taken down in late fall when the flower blooms are done. We use a mixture of sugar and water in our feeder: 1 part sugar and 5 parts water.
We have recently made some changes to this webcamera, however we wanted to keep the original webcamera installation information on the page as many people have requested it.
C-Mount Design (currently used):
A C-mount CCD video camera with a 12 MM fixed focus length lens is used for the hummingbird feeder camera. The video cable from the camera is plugged into an Axis Video Server inside the computer laboratory. The power requirement for the camera is 12 Volts DC, 500mA. The weatherproof enclosure houses the C-mount camera. This type of enclosure has a heater inside of it to keep condensation from forming. Although, we have found that the heat emitted from the camera is sufficient to prevent condensation from forming.
ViCam Design (former design):
The camera which is positioned on the hummingbird feeder is a USB ViCAM digital camera. In order to operate this camera through your computer you must have a USB card installed in your CPU. The camera has only one cable which supplies both power and video transmission. The USB version receives +5 volts from the computer's USB port but uses only 1.05 watts powered up. There is also a version of the ViCAM which uses a parallel port instead of the USB port. ViCAM supplies (additional cost) an interchangeable lens pack for the camera which contains a super close-up, close-up and wide angle lens options. To learn more about ViCAM, visit their website: www.vistaimaging.com.
Many people have asked why we have black background boards behind most of our web cams. This is so that the camera can focus on the foreground instead of the background. It also increases the amount of images per minute because the camera has less pixels and imaging to deal with. The solid, black color of the background also helps the colors in the birds feathers to show up brighter on camera.
Our Environmental Observatory camera is also a USB ViCAM with the wide angle lens attached. The sunlight is too bright in the mornings for this camera to properly operate so you will notice a black screen on the Environmental Observatory web cam until about 10:00 am.
Currently (June, 2001) this camera is not active.
