A pair of ospreys has set up house on top of a tower that provides lighting for the athletic fields of the University of Victoria on Canada’s west coast. A webcam captures their activities and they can be viewed online through a live feed.
The ospreys, also called fish hawks, have two chicks that can be seen when they raise their heads to accept fish brought to them by their dad. Mom apparently rarely leaves the nest and only brings back grasses to line the nest or comer any fish not immediately consumed.
Chicks ‘almost too ugly to be cute’
The chicks hatched probably around June 10. “You’ll notice that the chicks have dark, almost featherless heads for a week or so before they begin to look a bit more normal,” writes raptor Photographer Sarah Blackstone, who led the initiative to set up the webcam. “They are almost too ugly to be cute at that stage.”
Blackstone says the webcam is a big hit on and off campus. As she wanders around the building where she works, she says she sees the live feed up in the corner of people’s computers, where they can keep track of what’s going on.
There are several websites that offer webcam looks at wildlife in Canada. Among them, are more than 20 used by Banff researchers to view activities of bears, deer, sheep, lynx and other creatures.
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