“I watched Osprey five hours a day”: How the world fell in love with Naturlive flows | Livestreaming

In 2012 Dianne Hoffman, a retired consultant, became a peeing Tom. Five hours a day, she watched the antics of a couple, Harriet and Ozzie, who lived on the Dununvin Ranch in Montana.

The couple nibbled eagles and was streamed live when they incubated their egg cups. The eggs never hatched, but the Osprreys sat on them for months before they finally pushed them out of the nest.

“I think you have experienced grief,” says Hoffman, now 81, who watched the birds from 3,000 km away on the Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Hoffman processed her own grief after the loss of her husband, her brother and her father, and how she “returned to the world”.

“It was a very black time,” she says. Although Ozzie died in 2014, she still watches the nest and its current occupants an hour a day. “I can't imagine anything that made the internet better for me than these cams.”

Nature-focused live streams, which are set up near nesters, water holes, dens or landscapes to offer a lively, constant food of the natural world, have increased in the past two decades, supported by cheap cameras and remote internet connections. The drama of nature – or sometimes the lack of it – pulls people into it.

The seventh season of the TV series The Great Elch Migration of the Swedish broadcaster SVT included 20 days continuous live film material that pulled millions of spectators. NRK in Norway has broadcast 18 hours of salmon, which floats upstream and burns for 12 hours of firewood. With a viral fish door bell, the spectators in Utrecht can watch hiking fish in a castle.

In an increasingly urbanized society, since people spend more time on screens, they are less connected to nature. “While the technology can pull us away from the natural world, we also learned that the technology can unique to us to combine nature in a unique way,” wrote the researchers in a paper published in March.

According to another study, it was found in which Naturlive flows “could improve the lives of those who cannot leave their houses or live far from natural environments”.

Researchers at the University of Montana for the first time in 2012 concentrated a camera on Harriet and Ozzies Nest. At the end of the breeding season, the owner Suzanne Miller switched it off, but numerous people contacted them. “[They said] Please don't. We want to watch their ranch, ”says Miller. They could also see what was going on behind the nest, she says and wanted to continue watching.

Initially, Miller did not understand why someone as secular tasks such as. “I found it very strange at first,” she says. But she added three other living streams of the river, the guide and a bird case. It was only when she got sick and the house could not leave for six months that she understood the value of it – she was also enthusiastic about living streams of the farm.

If someone leaves a gate open, a viewer contacts the ranch within minutes to warn it. The members watched a veterinarian lay down a horse after thrown on ice and broken his neck. The horse's head shot in Millers when he died. “Many of these people are older and are death themselves,” she says. “It spoke about death.”

The stream has 275 paying subscribers, most of whom have never been on the farm. It cost 8 US dollars a month to be a member, and most are older people or people with reduced mobility. Several members have scattered their ashes there, although they had never entered the farm because she has become her favorite place in her recent years.

Many of these websites enable viewers to send each other or to publish messages in discussion rescue bodies. Fogcam was founded in 1994 and is often invited as the oldest continuously operated webcam in the world. It is a single livestream camera that publishes an image every 20 seconds and records the fog in San Francisco.

“If you can imagine it, there is probably a live stream about it,” says Rebecca Mauldin, assistant professor at the University of Texas in Arlington. “It is a new area for research, but it is not a new area, millions of people watch nature live streams.”

But they are not only a different form of entertainment – research results indicate that they could also be good for well -being. A new study waiting for the publication shows that playing nature-oriented live streams increases the well-being of some older residents of a nursing home and improves their mood, relaxation and sleep. An earlier study has also found that Dunrovin webcams for care home residents have a “significant positive change” and could be an “innovative and effective way” to improve the well-being more generally.

“I found that it is not just for older adults – there are all possible reasons why they may not have full access to nature,” says Maudin.

There are hundreds of webcams in 35 of the United States National Parks. The huge panda cam starts activities of animals in the Smithsonian National Zoo, and Africam sees wild animals with cameras all over Africa. In the UK, the Wildlife Trusts have 25 live webcams. One of the most popular is the wandering falcon on the town hall in the Leamington Spa with 160,000 prospects in 2024.

In more distant locations, webcams offer an alternative for people who cannot visit personally. In Skomer Island off the Welsh coast, the 42,000 parrot towels of the island are captured on a live stream, which had 120,000 prospects in 2024.

They are also a way to learn more about animal behavior. Conservationists use a living camera to study gray seals in the South Walney Nature Reserve that is free of human disorder because there is no public access to the beach. “One of our trainees discovered the first Seal puppy to be born via the camera in the reserve-a small, white, fluffy puppy among adults,” says Georgia de Jong Cleyndert, head of the marine at Cumbria Wildlife Trust.

For some birds like the Osprreys, double permanent cameras as CCTV. “The Osprey Cam mainly serves for security to ensure that these protected birds and their nests are safe and to serve as a deterrent for anyone who wants to harm them,” says Paul Waterhouse, civil servant for Cumbria Wildlife Trust.

Maudin says her research shows how live streams nature relax and help them to be able to relativize their own concerns.

“It also tells a lot about human curiosity – we like to learn, we like a feeling of surprise – sometimes it is nothing, sometimes it is something amazing. It longs for a connection with the world around us,” she says.

What can be seen

Would you like to watch nature online? Here are six of the most popular live streams that you start:

• Bears go fishing: From the end of June and July, bears flock to Brooks Falls in Alaska to catch migrating salmon. Sometimes up to 25 bears can be seen on the screen at the same time (if you can't wait until June, you will find two hours of film material as a trial here).

• Bats in motion: During the day everything is in the live stream of Bracken Cave, Texas, in the U.S.-calm, but in the evening you can be his 20 million Mexican bats that flock out of the cave to go hunting.

• Baby storks: In Knepp Estate in Sussex in Great Britain, a growing population of white storks live, which were bred for the first time after hundreds of years in 2020. A livestream shows the nest, which is currently playing hosts of four decreased descendants: Isla, Ivy, Issy and Ivan. At the time of writing, tear a small dead rabbit.

• Love Island for Osprey: This was like a series of HIT reality show, in which four Osprey couples fought for space in a nest on the hole of the Lowes Wildlife Reserve in Scotland. After weeks of refinement and the attacked, two birds claimed the top position and seem to lay their eggs in a basket.

• Go a drink: This live stream Spied on a water hole in the Tembe Elephant Park on the border of South Africa and Mozambique, and you can watch a steady stream of elephants, lions, rhinos and buffalos that drop by for a sip. After dark, the night vision of the camera illuminates a soothing, rotating world of moths and fireflies.

• Live Jelly Cam: The Jellyfish Cam from Monterey Bay Aquarium offers a hypnotic experience and dives into the calm world of the sea partnerships that are located in the Eastern Pacific. The jellyfish can be seen, the drop and pulsate their tentacles gently as they go.

And if you are already an enthusiastic observer, share your favorite -Live stream in the comments below.

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