Welcome

I hope you will enjoy watching the birds and change of seasons enough to stop in from time to time.

Be sure to scroll through the pictures below. They were all taken in my yard. If you are lucky, you might see some of the more rare visitors.

-The Feeders-

The feeder in the camera is a three-tubed affair. In two of the tubes there is a mix of black oil sunflower and striped sunflower seeds. The third tube has safflower seeds. This keeps the Cardinals plentiful.

There is a "food court" on the deck. On the top of a pole there is a house feeder that has a mix of black oil sunflower, stripped sunflower, and safflower seeds. Below the house are four arms. One has a clear tube feeder with sunflower chips. A wire tube feeder has thistle. There is also a short log with holes filled with suet. In the summer the fourth arm holds a hummingbird feeder or a fruit feeder for the Orioles.

Finally, there is a small box feeder stuck to the window of my office.

-Tech Stuff-

Camera 1 is a Logitech C500 that looks out the familyroom window. It points south-southwest so the sun can cause quite a glare when it gets low, especially in the winter. Sorry about that.

Camera 2 is an older Logitec QuickCam MP. It looks out the window in my home office and faces more directly south.

Both cameras are pretty inexpensive (about $US39) and for this application I think the quality is pretty good. The nice software makes them easy to set up.

To stream the video, I use Adobe Flash. The video from each camera is converted to Flash by two instances of Adobe Media Encoder. The Flash media is then streamed using Adobe Media Streamer. A simple Flash file in the web page displays the video. The quality using Flash seems much better and uses less bandwidth than any of the other streaming software I have used.

The chat box on the right is a free service provided by cBox.

Thanks for visiting!