WildEarth™

Support initiatives for the restarting of the drives - Comments and caution

2011-12-02T08:02:00.000+02:00

Quite a number of you have written to us about what can be done to restart the drives and, specifically, what they can do. As others might have the same questions, I thought it might be a good idea to write my reply publicly in a blog, rather than answer individually.

The situation is that we are actively looking for alternatives and different ways of bringing back safaris in a viable manner. There is nothing concrete at the moment, other than first contacts and explorations.

Until such time as this takes more shape there is not much you, as our viewers and supporters, can do. We hope to be able to come with news and plans early in the new year, but as said, cannot commit to anything fixed as we're still in the very early stages of reaching out.

A simple restart at Djuma in the same set-up is at this point in time not on the cards for a number of reasons. That is not to say we won't return (or stay, depending on how you look at it) there, but not in the next several months.

WildEarth is currently not actively involved in, or supporting, any 'rescue missions' and while we are grateful for all efforts and appreciate the support they reflect, I would ask everyone, as I've asked those that wrote to me, to 'keep their powder dry' until there is something concrete to put your efforts behind as that will be much more effective.

Finally, a note of caution on on-line safety. In times like these one needs to tread with extra caution as, while most efforts and requests for help are genuine and with only good intentions, there might be others that have less noble intents. In the past some people have abused trust of other viewers on Facebook and other networks to solicit personal information for, probably, malicious intent.

So, be especially careful with sending money or personal information as part of support initiatives and be sure to check and know how and where these might be used.

Aside from the CafePress stores and the tip jar, neither Djuma nor WildEarth are involved in any money-raising efforts, nor are we part of any efforts requiring personal information to be sent beyond a viewer's e-mail address and nick name.

While the following is not a comment on the intent of any specific initiatives, we advise against sending such info as a matter of principle. Unless you are 100% certain you know its intended use, and that it will only be used for this, and you know the person who'll be receiving it is who they claim to be, it is wise to not share anything you would not be comfortable sharing with a stranger you meet on the street.

If you are not sure whether something is supported by WildEarth or Djuma, feel free to ask us. (admin 'at' djuma.com will go to Jurie, contact 'at' wildearth.tv will come to us.)

Thanks for all your support,

Peter

More zoomies wanted!

2011-11-18T20:33:00.000+02:00

If all goes well we will be adding a number of moveable cameras over the next couple of months. Possible there will be a second cam at Djuma and it looks like we will add one or two waterhole cams in other exciting locations as well.

We had hoped these last would be running already, but red tape has proven quite sticky and has slowed the launch of these down.

As we do expect them fairly soon, and also in view of the holiday season that will soon be upon us, we'd like to bolster the zoomie numbers a bit so we can get the new ones trained before the rush starts.

If you are interested in helping out, have moderate computer skills and 10 hours/week available for zooming, drop me a note at zoomies@wildearth.tv with some info on your location, skills, time available and why you'd like to be a zoomie.

Everyone is welcome but we would particularly like to find more zoomies outside of North America to be better able to fill slots around the clock.

A number of you have contacted me already and I have your names, but feel free to resend your information now so I can have it all in one spot.

Thanks!

--Peter

Stopping of drives at Djuma at the end of November

2011-11-14T15:31:00.000+02:00

As you might have seen from Djuma's most recent blog, they have had to decide to stop the Safaris at the end of this month. While this is obviously a sad moment for all involved, we respect Djuma's decision and know it was not an easy one to take as the safaris are in Jurie's and Pippa's blood as much as in yours and ours. I do wish to thank them both for having tried to keep them going, even if in the end it turned out to be for a short period only.

Now what does this mean for the future? Is this the definite end of WildEarth's safaris or of our close ties with Djuma? 'No' in both cases.

WildEarth and Djuma go back a long way and will keep working closely together in the future as well. We provide whatever support we can from our side to make it possible for Jurie to get his second 'roving' camera up and running. (This would be a similar set-up to the wild dog den we broadcast from some years ago.)

As for the safaris: We are certainly not giving up on them and are looking into how we can bring them back in the future. Exactly how and when, and whether once again from Djuma or from a new location, remains to be seen but we simply love them too much to just give up and let this be the final chapter and close the book.

--Peter

WE need you help

2011-08-15T13:55:00.004+02:00

Well this morning (South African time) Pete left Cape Town and flew to Johannesburg, and now he is driving down to Djuma. His mission? To get all systems ready for the relaunch of the LIVE safaris on Wednesday (the 17th August) morning. Marc and Seb are back in camp, as of yesterday, and Becky will be filling in for Tara while she is still on holidays in England (until the end of August, when she returns to Djuma). There are still a few issues with the radio link from Djuma to Hoedspruit which need to be worked out before the Internet connection is good enough for streaming, but Pete and Jurie (and a few others) are working hard to get this all done by Wednesday morning.

In the meantime WE need to get ready to do our piece when they get the safaris LIVE. What exactly is 'our piece'?

Well many of you have offered to help WildEarth and Djuma increase the viewership of the Djuma Safari and Djuma Waterhole cams so that enough advertising revenue can be earned to pay Marc, Tara and Seb's salaries as well as the food, fuel, Internet bandwidth, maintenance and other costs that it takes to keep these safaris LIVE. To make this happen WE need to about double the current viewership. Over the past few weeks we have received literally hundreds of ideas to do just that. Some have been super good but just not very practical to implement, and after a great deal of discussion we have settled on 5 basic ideas.

The five ideas, that we are going to start with, to promote the cams are:

Embedding the players in as many high traffic sites as possible.

Advertising the fact that these streams are available to be watched.

Trying to get as much press for these cams as possible.

Getting the safaris into more schools.

Selling merchandise that encourages people to visit wildearth.tv and/or djuma.com

Obviously we don't want to start actually getting any of this promotion 'out there' before the safaris are back on air. It would just be a waste having people coming to visit pages where there was nothing happening, but we do need to start getting organised ...

The first thing that we need to do is call for volunteers and get all the volunteers organised into teams. We have chosen to use Yahoo Groups as a place to gather, discuss, debate and plan all our promotional activities, because Yahoo Groups has worked super well for the zoomies up till now. Here we can have little databases which keep a record of which journalists have been contacted, merchandise that has been approved, embedded players, etc. We can also maintain calendars of which schools will be interacting on the safaris when and files with docs explaining all the processes for advertising and so much more.

So if you are interested in volunteering your time, money, contacts, experience or passion to make these safaris successful the first thing you need to do is choose the team you want to join and send an email to that team address explaining what you have available to contribute. Here are the teams:

WEadvertise - Many people offered to donate money to keep the safaris running, but this cannot work as we cannot employ people in the hope that there will be enough donations each month to pay salaries. However, if you are willing to donate money to keep the safaris running then this is the team for you! This team will share ideas and experience in buying advertising on the Internet (Google Adwords or Facebook or other) and driving traffic to djuma.com, wildearth.tv or one of the Facebook pages where these cams are embedded. The idea is to very carefully buy advertising that can reach the kind of people that you think would like these cams and grow our viewership. weadvertise@wildearth.tv

WEmerchandise - This team not only helps grow our viewership, but you can also make money doing it! Thats right YOU can make money in this team. You can design and sell T-shirts, caps, ... anything as long as it includes the WildEarth and Djuma logos as well as web addresses and encourages people to visit our cams. WE and Djuma will supply you with logos and high resolution photographs, for FREE, and you can sell your products to the WildEarth community and keep 100% of the profits for yourself. However, the two rules are (1) each product must promote our web addresses and increase traffic, and (2) all artwork and merchandise has to be pre-approved by WildEarth and Djuma management. wemerchandise@wildearth.tv

WEpress - If you can write, or you have contacts in the media world, or you have the time to find lots of journalists email addresses and communicate with them, then this is the team for you. The WEpress team will focus on trying to get as many articles, TV/radio interviews, etc. for WildEarth and Djuma. This could have a very very large impact on traffic and could be the way that YOU make a large difference. wepress@wildearth.tv

WEeducate - WildEarth, and Djuma, has always been about teaching people about our natural world. Not lecturing people, but more immersing them in this environment and letting the learning happen. One of the greatest contributions any of us can make is to take this special experience into our children's lives through schools. Its been happening for a long time, but now we are going to encourage and organise school participation in our safaris. If you would like to be a part of the team that takes LIVE safaris, where kids can ask the ranger questions and get answers all the way from Africa, then this team is for you. weeducate@wildearth.tv

WEembed - At the end of the day what is going to make this all work is the number of people that WE can get to watch the stream. The team that focuses on taking the cams to where the audiences are is the WEembed team. This is all about reaching out to high traffic sites where the kind of people that we think would enjoy a LIVE safari or waterhole cam already visit and convincing them to embed our cams into their websites. So if you have some time to surf the web, email webmasters and get our cams 'out there', then this is the team for you. weembed@wildearth.tv

WE don't want to make too many rules and want this to be a community project, so if you feel you can contribute to more than one team then by all means join more than one. But please don't join and then not get involved and help. This is just demoralising for those that are trying hard. In fact if some volunteer, but don't seem to in a position to contribute much time, energy, experience, contacts, etc. then we will politely suggest that you wait till you have the capacity. Remember however, that you don't need money, experience or contacts to make a difference. There are going to be plenty of things to do that just require time and passion. WE will all help each other.

So to begin with choose your team/s and send an email explaining what you can contribute to that team. Then WE will decide (quickly) who can join the official teams and you will receive an invite to join the relevant group/s. From there we will work in small teams to get the basic plans in place, organise ourselves and prepare for the relaunch ...

Thanks, in advance, to all those of you that have expressed a desire to help us make this work and will be volunteering for a team.

-Graham

The safaris are coming back next week!

2011-08-09T16:37:00.001+02:00

WE are so excited to announce that if all goes according to plan the LIVE safaris from Djuma will be back on WildEarth at 06h30 (CAT) on 17th August 2011.

Tara, Marc and Sebastien will be presenting, directing and operating the camera on the Ganda and will be doing so under the auspices of Djuma Game Reserve. As most of you know Safari Television was no longer able to afford to continue running the LIVE safaris in the way that they had and was forced to stop broadcasting. Djuma very kindly, and very courageously, stepped up and has agreed to cover the costs of operating these safaris for 3 months, in order to give us all an opportunity to make them viable.

What does that mean, 'make them viable'? Well simply put it means that WE need to work together to increase the viewership of the safaris and the Djuma Waterhole Cam to the point that the Internet advertising served on these streams produces at least enough revenue to cover the operating costs of the safaris and the waterhole. The good news is that it is much cheaper for Djuma to operate this broadcast than Safari Television because they own the land and have an existing lodge, which means some of the costs are reduced or removed. However, we would still need to about double the current viewership.

WE need your help to promote these cams, and are excited that so many people have said that they will help. Over the past few weeks WE have received many many ideas and suggestions and we have been having numerous internal discussions figuring out how best to proceed. Talking to Jurie at Djuma we have narrowed down a few key things that we think can make the difference and substantially increase the viewership of this amazing broadcast. They are: (a) embedding the cams in as many high traffic sites as possible, (b) running several Google Adwords campaigns, (c) getting as much press coverage as possible, (d) encouraging you to sell T-shirts and curios (where you keep all the money) but that promote Djuma and WildEarth, (e) providing branded buttons and banners to sites to promote the cams, (f) getting the streams into as many schools as possible and (g) as much social media campaigning as possible.

After the incredible success of the zoomie volunteer community (more than 40 volunteers) that control the Pete's Pond and Djuma Waterhole cameras, we have decided to build a new promotion community based on the same Yahoo group system. I will be putting out a new Blog on the weekend that will both explain each of the various promotional ideas in much more detail as well as explain how you can volunteer to be a part of the teams that will tackle each approach.

The first stage is get everybody that wants to be a part of this drive to make the safaris sustainable into the group, and organise exactly what we are going to do and how. WE don't want this to become an uncoordinated affair where the wrong messages are communicated or where we are all working at cross purposes to each other. So please make sure that you do volunteer and join up with everyone else and work together in teams. Also, we must make sure that we don't start promoting before the safaris are actually back on air. There is no point in driving traffic to a player where there is no broadcast. We are aiming for the 17th August, but there are some things that are not in our direct control (e.g. the radio network from Djuma to Hoedspruit) that has to be finalised before then. So lets get everybody (that volunteers) into the group, make sure we all understand everything and be ready to leap into action the minute the safaris start up again. More info in a few days ...

Thanks for all your ideas and emails of support. You truly are a very special community of viewers and I am sure that together WE can make these safaris successful enough that they will be broadcasting on WildEarth from Djuma for many years to come.

-Graham

Djuma saves the safari drives!

2011-07-27T15:38:00.001+02:00

As you can read in the most recent Djuma blog, they have made the very generous offer to try and keep the daily Safaris going for at least a while longer. You can imagine our surprise and excitement when Jurie called us about this last week and asked us to explore with him if this could be done in a way that Djuma could afford. Since then we've gone through many different scenarios and have indeed managed to come up with a way that will work for Djuma.

At this point you might wonder why, if this can work for Djuma, it couldn't for Safari Television and that's a fair question to ask. There are a couple of important differences that explain this. As Djuma owns the 'resources', i.e. the land, access to the land, accommodation, a workshop, etc, it can operate at a much lower cost than any 'third party' operation could. Furthermore, Djuma can afford to run at a (limited) loss as the Safari drives is not their main business, but part of their marketing efforts.

With this lifeline that Djuma has provided it is up to us (WildEarth and its viewers) to, together with Djuma find ways to make this work and generate at least enough revenue to bring Djuma's cost within its allocated budget. This will probably mean some more advertising on the Safari broadcasts, but that alone will not be sufficient. We will also need to increase viewer numbers and this is where you, our viewers, can play a big role as well by spreading the word!

The drives will go of air for a little period of time while the close-down of Safari Television is completed and changes needed to allow Djuma to operate the drives are being implemented. The aim is to relaunch some time in the second half of August. This will also allow the new three-people crew (which will include Marc and Tara!) to start on the same leave schedule. (To allow running with only three people there only be drives for 6 weeks out of every 8 week period.) Djuma will share more detailed information over the coming days and weeks, so to keep up-to-date be sure to check their website, blogs and Facebook page.

To close off I'd like to thank Djuma, and Jurie and Pippa Moolman personally, for giving us a chance at keeping the drives going and continue to share with you what has become a second home to so many.

--Peter

Some Q&A on the end of drives on Safari Television

2011-07-16T19:08:00.000+02:00

Hello all,

I have read through all your comments and questions and want to take this opportunity to address some of your questions and look at it a bit more from a WildEarth perspective as well.

As many of you know WildEarth is majority owner of Safari Television, but the two are separate companies. Therefore while this situation will have its impact, it will not result in WildEarth stopping its other activities.

I thought I'd write this in the form of a Q&A based on the most often seen questions.

Q: Will this affect other cameras on WildEarth.tv?

A: No, it will not. Safari Television is its own company and is the company that is stopping its operations. WildEarth will continue to operate and broadcast the other cameras on its platform, including the cam at Gowrie Dam which is owned and operated by Djuma (with support from WildEarth and the zoomies who control and move the camera).

Q: Who will be affected by this?

A: As Safari Television will completely stop operating and close down it will affect everybody at Safari Television. That means Marc, Tara, Herman, Sebastien, Craig, Siphiwe, Cynthia, Carol, and Will.

Q: Will archives remain accessible?

A: Yes, all recorded footage will remain accessible.

Q: Will the safaris never return?

A: Safari Television is ceasing its operations at the end of this month. This is final and unfortunately cannot be changed. Having said that, we are all passionate about these safaris and will certainly not give up on looking for ways to bring them back to you. We hope to be able to, at some time in the future, rise from the ashes and restart the drives. We will certainly try very hard to find a way to do this, but if it happens it will not be through Safari Television.

Q: Should we send money to initiatives that are posted by others to collect funds to keep the safaris going?

A: No, Safari Television currently has not been approached by nor has agreements with anybody for raising funds from donations. Any such efforts posted might be legitimate attempts to help, but the internet is also full of people with less noble intentions. We therefore discourage sending money to any such initiatives as it will not help and might even hinder future efforts to bring the drives back.

Q: Could switching to a subscription-based model provide enough revenue to keep this going?

A: No, unfortunately generating enough subscription revenue to cover the costs for even a limited safari operation is not feasible. Broadcasting a safari is expensive, it requires much more than some salaries and an internet connection. Even assuming the safari would have many times the number of viewers they have now and that all of them would all be willing to pay for a subscription, a subscription model would not cover these.

Q: Is there anything else we can do to keep the safaris going?

A: Unfortunately not at this time. We will certainly not give up on finding a different way to broadcast the safaris in the future, but we ask that you give us a bit of time to work through everything involved in the closing down of Safari Television's operations which is inevitable. We promise that once that is behind us we'll work hard on bringing safaris back in one form or another. No promises, other than that we'll try hard!

I'm sure there will be many more questions after this, or maybe there were some that I missed for this blog. I will attempt to answer those in a future blog.

--Peter

Ustream + WildEarth

2011-06-29T16:28:00.000+02:00

WildEarth is super excited to announce our partnership with Ustream.tv

For the next few months WildEarth will be exclusively re-broadcasting our LIVE streams on the Ustream platform (as well as at wildearth.tv of course). Many of you have been watching some of our broadcasts on Justin.tv, YouTube and DailyMotion, but for a while these will not be active. The idea is to work exclusively with Ustream to build a large audience of LIVE wildlife viewers together.

Ustream and the Raptor Resource Project broke records in the past few months with the now world famous Decorah Eagles webcam. We hope to do even better with Ustream's new multi-view, which allows you to switch from one WildEarth stream to another right inside the player!

So please make sure to tell all your friends, 'join the crowd', Tweet and 'Like' our broadcasts. Lets see if we can build a really large audience of LIVE wildlife fans on Ustream.

As many of you already know WildEarth was very proud to launch and host Pete's Pond at Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana and equally proud to bring back the Djuma waterhole cam with Djuma Game Reserve in South Africa. These streams, along with our twice daily LIVE safaris will be available at Ustream.tv as well. There are also 3 x PixController cams and Penguin Point from the National Aviary. Soon Operation Migration's 'ground cam' will be starting up again, which will be followed by the exceptional flight cam where you can fly along with the Whooping cranes as they migrate across America.

The two waterhole cams are now being controlled by our dedicated global team of volunteer 'zoomies' around the clock. This team are also Tweeting all sightings on the WildEarth Twitter account: @wildearth.

Finally... Djuma's Gowrie cam returns

2011-06-23T12:01:00.000+02:00

After some last minute set-backs due to a recent mini-tornado that knocked over the tree we selected for the new camera (see this earlier blog), the new Djuma camera at Gowrie Dam is now, finally, ready for relaunch.

We are very happy to bring back this camera, which is one of, if not the, longest-running wildlife cameras in Africa, having started broadcasting well over a decade ago. (In those early days it only 'streamed' a refreshed still picture every 30 seconds!). When the cam returns tomorrow (Friday) at the end of the AM safari you will notice some changes from how it was before it was shut down for the upgrade.

Firstly we can again zoom and pan, and we have a dedicated and wonderful team of 'zoomies' that will control the camera around the clock and inform you of interesting sightings through our @wildearth twitter account. So there's no need to miss anything. If you can't come watch immediately, there are always our archives to check back at a later time.

Jurie and Pippa Moolman have been instrumental in making it possible to get the camera running again and Djuma will from now on be the 'producer' and be responsible for the maintenance and running of the camera. It will no longer be run from Safari Television, although as good neighbours they'll still support Djuma when needed.

This change, together with the remote zooming, obviously begs the question: "But what about Siphiwe?". Well, while Siphiwe will no longer be our local zoomie, she will stay and take on a more extensive role within Safari Television, supporting the crew with various organisational and administrative tasks. (For more info on this please read Will Fox's blog.)

So, all is ready, we're very excited, join us Friday morning at 0930 CAT for the relaunch of Djuma's Gowrie cam!

When it rains, it pours

2011-05-20T15:39:00.000+02:00

By now most of you will have heard about the freak storm we had at Djuma earlier this week. It didn't last long, less than 15 minutes, but that was enough to leave a trail of destruction that also Jurie Moolman said he'd never experienced before in his 30+ years at Djuma.

The storm broke as I was doing some broadcast equipment testing in the workshop, and there was not a dry spot anywhere as the rain was pelting in almost horizontally as Marc and I battled to find a dry spot for the camera and to get all equipment of the floor. By then the power was off, so we had to work by the light of Marc's cell phone display. Marc then ran the 10 meters to Final Control and back and in those few seconds was drenched with the ice cold rain.

Soon after, it all stopped and we went to our rooms to dry off (and Marc to warm up a bit :-) We thought that was it, but, boy, were we wrong.

A little later I started worrying about the cabling at the camera tree and decided to go see if it was still covered and dry. Driving out there I could not locate the tree, but at first blamed it on the darkness. I drove back and forth a bit until my head lights suddenly shone on some tree roots sticking up in the air... the roots of our intended camera tree. It was totally blown over and had crashed to the ground. Crushing the light that was in it under a branch. Had the camera been up already it would no doubt have vanished as well. Fortunately it was safe in Final Control due to a delay in getting the mounting ready.

At that point we thought we'd gotten away relatively fine and with no real damage other than some extra work and a delay in getting the camera up and running as the new location requires some pieces of equipment we had not planned on. (And possibly digging a 60 meter trench.)

Well, that was until we found out yesterday that the reason our internet links were down was that not that our antenna dish had moved, but that the complete top section of the mast had turned close to 30 degrees in this storm and our dishes were now pointing 'ins Blaue hinein' rather than at Mariepskop. This is a very serious issue as fixing that in will require a large crane and some careful planning to make sure it is done in a safe manner. Jurie, Graham and Will are working on getting this planned and organised and as will share progress on this as we move towards restoring our internet connection. --Peter

A new dawn: Pete's Pond returns

2011-05-11T23:17:00.000+02:00

As you all know we've been working hard on relaunching both the waterhole cameras located at Pete's Pond and Gowrie dam and are nearing the end of this effort.

With an unfortunate, last-minute power supply problem delaying the launch of Djuma's Gowrie cam until next week, Mashatu's Pete's Pond cam grabbed the lead and will be the first to cross the finish line. It will come back on-line this Saturday, at 0600 CAT, in time to catch the first light of a new day at the Pond. We hope you'll all be there to share this long anticipated and wonderful moment with us.

While the sight of the Pond has not changed, and will be familiar to many of you, some other things will be different. Most noticable will be the absence of a local camera operator, or'zoomie'. All control will therefore be done over the Internet by a group of remote 'zoomies'. More details on that have been posted in a separate blog earlier today.

The second one is that the distribution technology used will be Flash-based and thus different from before. I know this concerns some of you, but I firmly believe that, given a fair chance, you will come to see it is a change for the better.

Furthermore there are some exciting new features. The broadcast from Pete's Pond will be recorded and archived 24/7 which will make it easy to go back to sightings you might have missed. Also, in addition to wildearth.tv and mashatu.com, you will be able to watch it on Ustream and Justin.TV (with YouTube and some others to follow soon), as well as through the WildEarth application on the Roku set top box or on your iPad. We think this wider access will help create an even larger community of 'Pondies', all enjoying this fascinating glimpse into what's happening on Mashatu Game Reserve.

We hope to see you all at the Pond this Saturday at 0600 CAT!

Peter

Wanted: Zoomies!!!

2011-05-11T23:15:00.000+02:00

With the imminent relaunch of the cams at Pete's Pond and Gowrie Dam, WildEarth is looking for volunteers to help us control these cameras: To show them in the best light 24/7, as well as to let others know what's going on by tweeting sightings and entering video marks for the archives. Our intent is to create one group that will work across both cams, so one day you might be controlling the Pete's Pond, another Gowrie Dam.

While we would love to give as many people as possible the opportunity to control the cams at some stage, the reality is that the bigger the group of people, the more complicated it will be to manage and coordinate, so we will start of with a relatively small group and possibly add more zoomies later once all is running smoothly.

So, what does it take to be a 'zoomie'?

a reliable, at least 1 Mbps, internet connection
a willingness to commit about 10 hours/week for the next couple of months
the ability to work well within a team of fellow volunteers
a reasonable level of PC and internet skills
the ability to work independently, but within a set of clear guidelines
a basic knowledge of the common animals that can be seen on the cams
a willingness to help and share knowledge with fellow zoomies

Is this you? Then send an e-mail to zoomies@wildearth.tv with the following information:

your name, location and time zone
an indication of how much time you would have available and at which days and hours this would be
why you would like to be a zoomie
a little bit about your past with WildEarth and/or Pete's Pond (for my interest mostly :-)
an indication of your familiarity with the species that could be seen on the cams

It would be great if we could get a truly diverse mix of people for this. People from different time zones (very important) and countries, from different viewing backgrounds (new as well as first-hour viewers), and from the silent majority as well as the 'not-so-silent minorities' ;-). Everyone is equally welcome to put their name in the hat and will be fairly considered.

Once a first selection is made I will get in touch with everyone to start the training and scheduling and get this show on the road as soon as possible.

I look forward to hearing from you!

UPDATE: The application process for zoomies is open again.

--Peter

Archives: The return of a long-lost friend

2011-04-19T08:02:00.000+02:00

When we suddenly had to move from Zaplive's platform to our own one last year we knew we were going to be in for a challenging time, and that it would take a while to restore all the features we'd gotten so used to. Basically we had to start with a clean sheet of paper and develop everything from the ground up. But, even so, we would never have thought that reconstructing a recording and archiving system would take as long as it did.

We've finally cracked it though and it will be relaunched later today. With a few exceptions, most streams have been recording again for some time already, so there will be lots of 'old' footage to look back to and 'video mark'. (Some exceptions unfortunately include the Safari game drives and water hole camera where due to the streaming issues we've only managed to properly start recording about two weeks ago.)

All the recordings and video marks made in the old days, when they were still called 'seek points' or 'hot spots' will be available again. Only once we started working on it did we realise there were so many of them. We're starting off with almost 500,000 video files and close to 80,000 video marks from the old days and are now adding thousands of new clips every day. Hopefully soon to be augmented by lots of video marks created by you.

Another amazing fact we found was that over half of the existing video marks were created by two people only! Between the two of them, Kathy (in WV) and Sharon Moser created close to 45,000!!! I can't even imagine how much effort they must have put into that. To them, but also to all other video markers a big 'thank you' from us and I'm sure all other viewers, as archives without video marks are like an encyclopeadia without an index: There's lots of valuable info, but it's impossible to find.

While the general functionality will be the same as before there are also some notable differences:

The archives are fully functional from within the player, and that includes embedded players on other web sites.
In addition to a title and description, pre-defined 'tags' can be added. These will help with searching as they will avoid mis-spelling and regional spelling differences.
There are several ways of finding archive clips and video marks, including directly entering a date, and the player will stay on that page after watching a clip, so no more need for endless going back one page at the time for each clip.

The version that will be launched is a basic version. PixelProject will still be smoothening out some of the rough edges over the coming days, but in view of all the nest activity we decided to not hold back the release any longer. For future releases, we will add Facebook and other sharing, separate pages for archives with more tagging and search options and, very soon 'seamless play' will be added, This means that once the end of one clip is reached, the next one will start playing automatically. This will making watching long events, like e.g. Safari's game drives, or events that run across two or three clips that much easier and pleasant.

One final bit of good news for many, as we've had many questions about this, is that the wild dog den archives will also return! A little bit more work is needed here, but I'm hoping to make them available within a week from now.

As said, all functions should work, if sometimes with a rough edge, and we'd like to hear your feedback on any problems you might encounter, suggestions for improvements, etc. Please send these to webmaster@wildearth.tv and include the word Archive somewhere in the subject line, so we can identify them.

Finally, together with our producers I've tried to add as many tags for all streams as possible, but if you feel some you'd like to add are missing also please let us know at webmaster@wildearth.tv, with 'Tags' somewhere in the subject line.

--Peter

WE won a Roscar

2011-04-02T12:07:00.000+02:00

The whole crew at WildEarth Safari are over the moon because we won a Roscar (Rhino Oscar) for our LIVE safari broadcast.

This is a great honor and a special moment for the whole team. As many of you know WE have been working and toiling for many years to bring the world a quality LIVE safari experience and winning this award is a sign that our peers in the world of wildlife filmmaking recognize this contribution.

The Roscar was awarded in the new category of 'Alternate Broadcasting'. I think the fact that our broadcast is both LIVE and in 3D was a large factor in the judges decision making. This combination of LIVE and 3D makes the experience of watching our safari extremely immersive if you are lucky enough to have a 3DTV and can receive our High Definition broadcast channel (WildEarth) on either Freebox (France) or Roku (United States).

The awards ceremony was the culmination of the 2011 WildTalk Africa conference held at Spier wine estate near Cape Town, South Africa in late March. The conference was extremely interesting and WildEarth had a booth where we demonstrated our 3D content, presented some of our upcoming projects and had the opportunity to network with many of our industries leading producers. We were also honored to be invited to chair a panel discussion entitled 'Beyond TV', which was a very interesting discussion about some of the alternative distribution channels open to wildlife filmmakers. Of course 3D dominated the conference and WildEarth was also represented on panel discussions related to 3D work flow and specifically the LIVE broadcasting of 3D High Definition video.

Pete's Pond LIVE broadcasts to return

2011-03-18T15:51:00.000+02:00

Pete's Pond is a waterhole located on the Mashatu Game Reserve in the far south-eastern part of Botswana and was created by Pete Le Roux after whom it is named. A camera and broadcast system were set-up in cooperation with National Geographic in 2005 and it has since been broadcast to the web as NatGeo's WildCam for many years during which it has grown a large and dedicated following.

Ever since it went off air just under a year ago there has been a continued call from the 'Pondies', as dedicated watchers call themselves, for its return and WildEarth is honoured to now have been chosen as Mashatu's partner for bringing back the LIVE broadcast from Pete's Pond.

Together with Pete Le Roux we are currently completing a detailed plan of what needs to be done to relaunch the broadcast. While most equipment is still in working order and can be re-used, some of it will need to be replaced due to being outside for so long or monkey damage. We are also working on re-establishing the satellite link that will be used for the broadcast. Once this assessment is completed we will be able to provide more specific info on when Pete's Pond will be back.

We look forward to bringing back Pete's Pond and to being part of its continued success and, while we are gearing up for this, would love to hear from you. So, please let us know what you think is important for Pete's Pond and what you would like to see.

As suggested on the Pond's current Facebook home, we will start by creating a new page in the next couple of days and look forward to meeting you there, Pondies old and new, to answer questions and get better acquainted.

--Peter

Lily's cubs are born

2011-01-24T13:40:00.000+02:00

At lunchtime on 21st January many people around the globe heard a squeal coming from Lily's den. A few hours later they heard the same thing. So it has been confirmed that cubs have been born but there still is confusion as to how many. The first reports said 2 but now there are reports that a 3rd and 4th came in.
A video of the birth(s) is posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuH5ADPwx3Q, see what you think.

Lily put everyone on alert on 20th Jan when she clenched her teeth at 5:08 PM. Last year, teeth-clenching signaled the onset of labor, and Hope was born 21 hours and 39 minutes later. This year, teeth-clenching to the birth at 1:51 PM on 21st Jan was 20 hours and 43 minutes.

However this year the Bear Centre had many more worries. At 12:30 AM on 20th Jan, Sue was awakened by a call from a Den Cam Team member in South Africa saying the Den Cam was down. Several calls later, the Team decided someone had to snowmobile to the shed and fix something. Sue awakened Lynn at 1:30 AM with that news. But the temperature was near 40 below zero. Preparations had to be perfect to avoid a calamity. Lynn said to wait for first light despite the possibility of missing the births as the journey would be a very dangerous one.

After a dilemma as to who would be the person to brave these kind of conditions it was decided that it would be Jason as he was the youngest. By 9:15 AM, Jason had the video streaming again.

The next worry was whether Hope would disrupt the new litter by trying to nurse, letting in potentially lethal cold on these days of near record low temperatures. Everyone was surprised to hear Hope still suckling as Lily was bracing for delivery of the 1:51 PM cub. We also were surprised by how quiet Hope was during and after the delivery.

So the question is has she had more than two cubs? We know that there is at least two because video footage captured showed one cub nursing and one cub squawking. But at 11:29 PM Lily began the same insistent grunting that accompanied Hope’s birth last year and the births yesterday at 1:51 and 3:03 PM. Could Lily give birth to a third cub more than 8 hours after the second? We'll keep you posted. Also if you want to keep up with the daily diary from Lily's den then log onto www.bear.org.

Video can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pBfeIiVXM.

Emily Wallington

Is Lily in labour?

2011-01-19T13:40:00.000+02:00

Well I guess the question on every ones mind is 'Is Lily going to have cubs'? The Bear Centre think definitely. On 16th Jan Lily lifted one of her legs to scratch and revealed a greatly swollen vulva - much bigger than even a week before.

On January 15th 2010 a glimpse was caught of her vulva and it was hugely swollen like today - she then gave birth to Hope 7 days later. This means the cubs are now only 4 days away. My prediction is 23rd January. Not only is that 4 days from now but it is Grahams birthday so it would be nice to be on that day.

Just before 11 AM on the morning of the 16th, Sue Mansfield from the Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Centre noticed Lily was taking deep breaths at twice her normal resting rate. This continued for nearly 15 minutes. They waited anxiously, but all has been quiet since then in the den. In fact, Lily has hardly moved.

Since then Hope has become incredibly attached to Lily and wants to nurse all the time. She was supposed to hibernate but instead all she wants is Lily's nipples and when she doesn't have them she is bawling for access.

How close can birth be? With Hope doing what she is doing then there is fear that the cubs will be in for competition. Let’s hope Lily can make a lot of milk and that Hope doesn’t hog all the nipples. We have so many questions about what is going to happen once Lily has given birth. For example can Mixed-age litters survive? What will Hope do during labor? Will Lily make her get out of the way and stop trying to nurse?

Another question is to try and understand what Hope is getting when she sucks from Lily's nipples.

Could Lily be producing colostrum already? The people from the Bear Centre could go out and check but it is likely that if she is Hope will have drained them already. Below is a quote from a former lactation consultant which sheds some light on what could be going on.

'As a former Lactation Consultant and longtime breastfeeding educator, I do know that colostrum, in humans, can be expressed well before giving birth. It sometimes leaks and crusts on the nipples. Although breast milk composition differs among species, the biological mechanism is about the same. I would imagine that colostrum is attracting Hope to the nipple.........that, and the fact that she was weaned abruptly during the separations from Lily. —Joanne M. Schwab

So watch this space and hopefully next time you read this blog Lily will have had her cub(s).

Emily Wallington

Lilly the Black Bear is back!

2011-01-08T14:27:00.000+02:00

Many of you will remember Lily, a wild American black bear, who is part of the long-term study of black bear ecology and behavior being conducted by biologist Lynn Rogers of the Wildlife Research Institute near Ely, Minnesota. Last year WildEarth broadcast directly from Lilly's den whilst she was pregnant and hibernating. The birth of her lone female cub, Hope, was broadcast live to 25,000 viewers on January 22, 2010 . Hearts melted as Hope's tiny paw reached out to touch Lily's nose just after the birth.

Unfortunately, one cub was not enough to keep Lily from coming into estrus last spring. Lily abandoned Hope during the May mating season. Five days later, Hope was found - 2 miles from where she was abandoned - and reunited with Lily. However, by then, Lily's milk ducts were clogged and Hope became weak trying to keep up with Lily. Researchers stepped in and began feeding Hope a special formula. When Lily abandoned Hope a second time, no attempt was made to reunite them.

Researchers set up a feeding station to keep Hope alive in the wild until wild foods became available and she could forage on her own. They also placed a tiny radio-collar on Hope so they could monitor her movements. Hope thrived. Eventually Hope and Lily crossed paths and reunited on their own. They travelled and foraged together through the late summer and fall, and they denned together in late October.

American black bears normally give birth every 2 years, but Lily was seen with males during last spring's mating season and is likely pregnant. If she gives birth in mid-late January, we will have the rare opportunity of observing a mixed age litter - new cubs and a yearling from last year's litter. How will Hope react to new cubs?

Once again a camera has been placed in her den and we started WildEarth started broadcasting LIVE on December 30th. http://www.wildearth.tv/lily-black-bear-den Bill Powers and his Pix Controller team provided the equipment and have put a camera outside of the den this time as well that can pan,tilt and zoom. This will be excellent to see whats going on outside and also when Lily starts to go out and about. Only one camera will be streaming at a time, and these cameras can be selected and remotely controlled by members of the Bear Center or PixController, Inc. Engineers.

To learn more about bears and this bear research visit the North American Bear Center atwww.bear.org/website/ and the Wildlife Research Institute at www.bearstudy.org.

New cam: Eagles4Kids.com project

2010-12-07T19:08:00.000+02:00

WildEarth is proud to host this very special Bald Eagle camera on its site.

Eagles4kids.com was created by third and fourth graders from Blair-Taylor Elementary School in Wisconsin, USA.

Mike Lawrence, their teacher, had watched a nest with his students for several years in California and decided to put a camera above an eagle's nest in the local area. This project was funded through a STEM grant from the State of Wisconsin. The grant money needed to be used for science, technology, engineering or mathematics curriculum, or multiple curriculums.

The students have created the name and design of the webpage, made brochures and business cards to promote the project, and will be creating newsletters with the latest news on the nest. The students will also be responsible for maintaining the webpage and responding to all inquires. Be sure to check out their web site!

The live view of the Bald Eagle's nest through eagles4kids.com is located in Western Wisconsin on private land. The nest is about 17 miles from the Mississippi River and close to the Black River. The nest was built five years ago in a cottonwood tree along a trout stream. Eaglets have been raised in the nest for each of the last five years. The nest has an approximate diameter of 5 feet and is about 4 feet deep. The camera is installed 4 feet above the nest.

Viewer count is back!

2010-12-02T15:01:00.000+02:00

A very brief and quick blog this time, but with some good news.

One of the features that was missed by many of you was the viewer count in the player. Now it is back! The number at the bottom of the player will show the number of viewers watching a broadcast with the PixelPlayer, whether on the wildearth.tv website or through an embedded player somewhere else. The number will constantly update as people join and leave, rather than once every minute or so, similar to the user count in chat.

In case you do not see the viewer count the next time you watch a stream, refreshing the page or cleaning the cache of your browser should make it make it show up... and will from then on also add your session to the viewer count.

Enjoy,

Peter

Chat 2.0 is here!

2010-11-26T09:10:00.000+02:00

Yesterday the long awaited, and much needed, new version of our chat rooms was published. To make sure it would fulfill our needs the team at WildEarth Interactive built this new chat engine from the ground up. Not an easy task, but it now gives us a chat tailor-made for us and one we can adapt and modify as our needs develop and change.

The first priority was obviously to fix what was wrong with the old version (crashes, high CPU usage, impact on streaming, etc) and all of these have indeed been addressed and fixed. In addition to this some improvements were made to the look and feel.

Some of the improvements and (new) features that are already incorporated at launch are:

improved stability (It has been tested with one thousand 'chat bots' to see if it could handle the load and it passed this with flying colours!)
lower CPU usage and no impact on stream performance
stable user list, viewable side-by-side with chat
large font support for those with less than 20/20 vision ('A' button)
more colours to improve readability
private messaging in a separate tab
time code in users time zone
the ability to watch chat without logging in
the ability to post links

It also provides improved moderation tools to help better manage the chats, something which a number of our producers had asked for.

E.g. a 'kick' option has been added, similar to the one on Justin.TV, that allows a user who is breaking the community guidelines to be quickly, but temporarily, removed from chat without immediately having to go to a full 'ban'.

We will of course keep developing the chat engine and will add more features and improvements as we go along. For this, as always, your feedback would be very helpful. So tell us what you think is right, wrong, or could be better at webmaster@wildearth.tv.

-- Peter

Penguins!!

2010-11-25T09:32:00.000+02:00

This brand new penguin webcam gives you a sneak peek into Penguin Point, the National Aviary's African penguin exhibit. African penguins, also known as jackass penguins, are native to South Africa and live in a climate similar to Pittsburgh: cold in the winter, warm in the summer. The Aviary's exhibit currently features a colony of 10 penguins: Patrick, Stanley, Elvis, Simon, Sidney, Preston, Dottie, Rainbow, Demi, and Owen. They share their exhibit with two Cape shelducks.

Penguin Point is a brand-new $1.7 million African penguin exhibit that immerses visitors in the sights and sounds of a real penguin colony. This fascinating new webcam will give you a perspective of African penguins doing what penguins do best — waddling, squabbling, scaling rocks and torpedoing their way through the water.

In time, the National Aviary hopes to breed select members of the group as part of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) African Penguin Species Survival Plan, a carefully monitored breeding program that seeks to preserve healthy, genetically diverse populations of African penguins.

Already as part of this Plan, two of their African penguins, Kristen and New Penguin, are living off-exhibit with the hope of breeding in the near future.

Hopefully soon we will have some very tiny penguins to show you. Watch this space!

Emily Wallington

New Bald eagle Cam at Lake Ozarks

2010-11-23T09:04:00.000+02:00

WE are really happy to announce that we have a brand new bald eagle cam on WildEarth. It is set up at Lake Ozarks in Missouri.

Springtime at Central Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks means the return of migrating birds. With 1,150 miles of shoreline surrounded by thousands of acres of wooded hillsides, the Lake of the Ozarks is one of the best places in Missouri to spot a spectacular variety of birds

About 2,800 bald eagles annually migrate to Missouri, including more than 100 that congregate at the Lake of the Ozarks to spend the winter soaring high above the Osage River and Bagnell Dam, diving for fish. These majestic birds arrive in October and remain in the area until middle or late March.

This eagle cam was installed on the Lake of Ozarks by Jim Ray. It overlooks a bald eagle nest occupied by two eagles named Elsie and Einstein. Jim explains: "This setup is right in our back yard,we sometimes even have coffee with the eagles”!

The cam is an Axis 214 PTZ mounted inside of an upside down 15 gallon aquarium, with small heater and thermometer on a platform 40' off the ground.

Elsie & Einstein came to this location in August 2009 and built their first nest 150 feet north of their current location. In 2009 they hatched 2 eaglets but only one survived into the early summer.

Last year the Important dates were February 10th when the first egg was laid and March 17th when the first chick hatched. These dates may be a bit earlier than the Canadian eagles due to the climate.

This year they moved their nest even closer, about 80 feet from Jim's back deck. Unfortunately last year he had this cam on his roof and there were many branches between where the cam would have been and the eagles nest so he made the decision to not broadcast it live. However, this year the view of the nest is much better and so WildEarth and Jim will hopefully bring you some fantastic images throughout eagle breeding season. WE are very excited.

Best viewing time is sunrise central US time.
You can find more information at Jim's website: http://webpages.charter.net/jray59/

Emily Wallington

New cameras for Pix Controller

2010-11-21T16:11:00.000+02:00

Pix Controller recently started streaming two new wildlife cameras. Both are streaming from remote areas in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The second wildlife camera is similar to the current wildlife camera, but this system has a high resolution camera setup close to the animals. There is a feeder that puts out a small amount of feed at day light and dusk to attract animals such as whitetail deer, wild turkey, gray squirrels, raccoons, chipmunks, birds, and much more. This is in a more remote area than the current wildlife camera and we hope to see some different types of activity. They have found out that this is close to a whitetail deer bedding area and on several occasions have had deer bed down and sleep right in front of the camera.

The next new camera is the predator camera. At this camera site they put out road killed whitetail deer, which is a common occurrence in Pennsylvania due to the high deer population. These deer carcasses are put to good use to feed and attract an array of predator wildlife such as red fox, gray fox, coyotes, hawks, owls, and raccoons. This is a great opportunity for you, the audience to see predator animals which are otherwise rarely seen.

WE hope you enjoy these two new cameras and thanks to Bill Powers and the whole Pix controller team for putting these together.

Emily Wallington

Is there water in Dixie?

2010-10-23T13:36:00.000+02:00

Recently there has been a great deal of confusion about whether or not there is any water flowing in Dixie, whether or not the viewers were given credit for their donations and efforts in raising money for the 'water for Dixie' project on Bush Warriors Blog in a July 2010 article, how much money was left over after the purchase and installation of the pump earlier this year and where that money was being kept. This Blog is an attempt to try and clarify all of this ...

Before I begin I want to state that WE, and Emily and I (Graham Wallington) in particular, did not handle any of this well. We first did two simple, quick and visual projects where we raised a little money. WE took the kids from Dixie to a film in Nelspruit and recorded the whole experience. Then we raised a little more money and gave all the kids Christmas presents and gave the whole village a Christmas lunch which WE broadcast LIVE. These projects were highly successful in every way, and this success made us quite confident ... maybe a bit over confident.

So we decided to take on the much larger project of providing the whole village (about 300 homes) with fresh running water. As many of you know, this village does not have the kind of reticulated water service to the home that we all take for granted. They are forced to make do with a few 'stand pipes' in the village which are unreliable at best. WE entered the Amazee race and came second and third which entitled us to a $5,000 donation. The effort by our audience to get as many members of our Amazee project as possible was nothing short of miraculous. People all over the world worked tirelessly around the night to get their friends and families to join the project. Although we did not win first prize it was an amazing achievement.

In addition some $1,130 was donated directly by the audience. Now while this is not an insignificant amount of money it is far from enough to supply fresh running water to every home in Dixie. We always knew this, and set about trying to raise much more money, knowing that it could not come from our audience. A large NGO was approached, who 'do' these kind of projects, and they indicated that they would be able to raise the necessary funds fairly easily after we had done two things: (1) gotten permission from all the stakeholders, and (2) a thorough and accurate costing of the project. They also made it clear that they would not get involved in any project that any element of corruption involved. So if we needed to bribe anybody to get the permissions then they could not be involved. Very understandable, I think.

Well of course it was not difficult to get permission from the Dixie community (represented by the Dixie Community Forum), after all they are the people who need the water project to happen. The municipality, while not very well organized, have no reason to withhold permission and after all this project should really be their responsibility. However, the chief, a Mr. Hosni Mnisi, of the area under which Dixie finds itself, simply does not provide his all important permission to any project unless there is 'something in it for him'. There is actually far more to this story, which is the subject on an entire book about the traditional leadership of South Africa.

In any event we now found ourselves in a quandary. We spent some months trying to negotiate our way around this problem, but it could not be done. Not only because he wants his 'share', but also because he hates Rexon with a passion, because Rexon successfully won a high court case several years before preventing this man from disposing of Dixie land for his own benefit. So our association with Rexon, by virtue of the fact that he worked for us, made it even harder.

So we had no choice but to find somebody else to try and get this permission. We turned to the Buffelshoek Trust. With whom, it was agreed, we would work if they were (a) able to get the necessary permissions that we could not, and (b) chose to involve themselves with this project. Some 6 months or so after our initial meeting they sent through a letter from the Dixie Community Forum granting permission to the 'water for Dixie' project. Of course this permission was 'not enough' and although I have not spoken to the Buffelshoek Trust recently, I can only assume that they have not been able to get the chiefs unconditional support.

Then the pump broke at Dixie!! This meant that there was no water at all. So the municipality began to send water bowzers (truckloads of water) to the village and promised to fix the pump. Those promises did not materialize and the bowzers were late and irregular. The people were suffering, and yet we had the $6,130 available specifically to provide water ... something had to be done. So Emily and Rex got to work. Please read Emily's Blog all about what happened, and how some of the money was spent.

Although no long term decisions were taken after the pump was put in and water was flowing in Dixie, we did kind of decide that the best use of this money was to just keep on maintaining the status quo while we tried to figure out how to get the full project back on track. In the meantime Rexon was fighting a complex and incredibly important battle to wrestle control of the land from the traditional leader (the chief) and into the hands of the people. This convoluted and complex story, which I still do not fully understand and is certainly a subject of a book, culminated in a constitutional court decision. It's possible, but by no means certain, that this decision could result in a constitutional amendment which would remove any power of the traditional leaders over the land. In turn this might mean that the only permission that is required to get the 'water for Dixie' project back on track would be the municipality and the Dixie community. We are awaiting clarity on this and will share that clarity when we have it.

There have been some rumors that the water was not flowing in Dixie at the moment. I can confirm that as of yesterday morning there was water at the few stand pipes in Dixie in which there has been water over the past few years. There are some broken pipes, which connect a few other stand pipes, but these pipes have been broken for some years now. However, the diesel necessary to run the pump, that we replaced earlier in the year, is unreliably supplied by the municipality. Therefore sometimes the pump does not run because there is no diesel to run it. (Yesterday there was 20 liters of diesel at the pump). At least part of the problem is that there is no safe place to store the diesel, to make sure that it is only used for the pump and not for any personal uses. There is a small concrete building where the diesel used to be stored, but the lock on this building has gone, and the door broken off.

I have agreed with Rex that the remaining money will be used to try and keep the water flowing in Dixie, while we try to understand the implications of the recent constitutional court decision. In the short term we are going to replace the door and lock on the small 'diesel house', and then buy some diesel as and when the municipality don't deliver. There are some real risks here. One of which is committing to making sure that come what may we will make sure that there is always diesel in the house. You can imagine that a 'bottomless barrel of diesel' risks being abused, and soon the money would run out. And that money was meant to supply water to the people not diesel to individuals. So a careful approach to this is required.

The important thing is that the money raised for the 'water for Dixie' project will all be spent on keeping the water flowing in Dixie.

In summary I would like to say that I have made mistakes. I apologize to you, the donors, for not accounting better, both in terms of the finances and in terms of the progress of this project. I have also learned some lessons. Firstly, that WE are not an NGO. We do not know how to be an NGO, and cannot become one, but WE must help the communities that share the land WE all enjoy so much. Secondly, it is better to not hold back anything, no matter how sensitive you think that information is, because some people are suspicious when you do not share everything you know. This seems to be seriously worsened when there are private donors concerned, and I completely understand that.

Written by Graham Wallington

Money raised for 'Water for Dixie'

2010-10-23T13:35:00.000+02:00

It has been brought to my attention that many of you are concerned about the money raised in donations for the 'Water for Dixie' project. Many of you will remember that we won $5000 from Amazee for this project and on top of that our viewers raised $1130, so altogether $6130. Once again thank you to all those people that contributed to this, it was a fantastic effort and something that you should all be proud of.

WE planned to use this money to get water into each and every home in the village (approx 300 homes). Once we had finished raising the money we drew up plans and looked into the cost of this and realised that a proper water reticulation system to every home in the village was going to cost in excess of $30,000. It was a mistake on WE's behalf. We should have drawn up these plans in advance of raising the money and made it very clear to our donors that unless we raised this money ($30,000) then we would need to work with another body to get to this amount. Graham then set about talking to people such as the Buffelshoek Trust and a large NGO to help with this. After many discussions with them WE realised that they could not and would not move forward on this without the relevant permissions in place. This would take time as there are a lot of politics within the community that needed to be resolved. Grahams blog explains more about this and also what has been done in trying to sort this out.

What I want to communicate to you in this blog is what has happened to the money that was raised by yourselves and by Amazee whilst these problems within the village have been being resolved. As many of you know in May of this year the old pump that has been supplying water to the village of Dixie for many years broke. Now this pump did not give each and every household water to their stand but it did provide water to a number of taps around the village which people could go to and collect water for use within their house. So as you can imagine this was absolutely awful. They did not have drinking water, cooking water, bathing water........nothing at all. WE knew we had to do something and so decided to use some of the money that was donated to make sure that the village of Dixie had access to water again.

Rexon and I set about sourcing a new pump. I spent many many days on the phone to Rex, the water department and suppliers to try and work out what was wrong and what was needed to resolve the problem. Rex finally managed to get someone from the water department, apparently someone who knew a lot about these old mono pumps and together they went to various suppliers to see if they could get a new one. They believed that the pump that was needed was a Mono pump BP30H. We were told by the suppliers that this needed to be especially manufactured for us in Johannesburg and sent to Mpumulanga. I can't remember exactly how long this took but I think it was around two weeks. Laeveld Bou (supplier in Hoedspruit) finally delivered it to Djuma which is where it was stored for a few days until Chris Dreyer could come and put it in the ground. Chris Dreyer has a company called 'The Drain Surgeon' and he lives in Hoedspruit and does a lot of building work at lodges within the Sabi Sands. He is well respected in the area and happens to know a huge amount about pumps. He arrived at the site and quickly realised we had the wrong pump. It was too big and too strong and although we still needed a mono pump, a smaller one was necessary. As you can imagine Rexon and I were devastated. We had spent a long time sourcing the first one and it had been made especially for this purpose and now it was useless. Whilst Chris Dreyer set about sourcing a new one I contacted Laeveld Bou to see if we could have our money back.

Within a week Chris had fitted the new pump (I am not sure what the spec is on this one but I have contacted Chris and will update you as soon as he phones me back) and new pipes that had been broken and the water was flowing again. Eventually after about a month WE received most of the money back from the first pump but not all of it.

Once again thanks to absolutely everyone who made this possible. It was a real crisis when the community had no access to water at all and so your money saved this situation and got the water to the taps again. Below is a break down of money received and money spent so far. I would like to apologise that we have not done this earlier. Communication has not been as it should be and from now on WE will publish every cent that gets spent on keeping the water flowing in Dixie.

Money raised
$6130
Money spent
Mono pump(BP30H) - R15912.15
Chris Dreyer invoice:-
Mono pump - R6578.95
Cost of installing bore hole pump including all pipes, fittings, labour and travel costs - R8333.33
VAT - R2087.72
Money back
Money back on pump (BP30H) = R13500.06 (received from Laeveld Bou).

Total spent - R15912.15 + R6578.95 + R8333.33 + R2087.72 = R32912.15
Total spent after money back from pump - R32912.15 - R13500.06 (money back from pump) = R19412.09
Total spent in USD - R19412.09 = $2791.45

Money left over - $6130 (money raised) - $2791.45 (money spent) = $3338.55

The money left is $3338.55.

Written by Emily Wallington

'The end of an era': Developments at Zaplive and how they impact us.

2010-09-22T17:05:00.000+02:00

Since the launch of the new website earlier this month we've received lots of feedback from you, our viewers, pointing out what you liked, did not like and where there were problems with it. Thank you for that, please keep sending us your praise, gripes, joys and irritations, all are invaluable in making sure the current problems with it will be resolved as soon as possible.

One recurring criticism was that we rolled out the new site before it was ready. This is obviously a fair, and correct at that, point to make as some features (e.g. archiving) were not ready yet, while some others (most notably the chat) did not work as they should. Until today we could not really respond properly to this question as the main reason for launching the site when we did, could not yet be made public.

Now that Zaplive has publicly announced it yesterday, we can also share this information with you.

Unfortunately Zaplive will stop operating in its current form by the end of this month and this means that from that date onwards we can no longer use their player and the site they were hosting for us. Originally this was to happen already last month, which is why we did roll out our incomplete site when we did, knowing it was incomplete and would probably have some bugs in it. Not doing so, would have risked being caught without a site at all!

Since Zaplive shared this news with us, we've been working hard on first finding a new partner and then on building a new player and site together with them. If the past months have shown us anything, it's that it is no easy task to rebuild all the features Zaplive had built into their player and website, whether it be the registration and chat, or the player, archiving and hotspots. And, while it may seem strange to say so at this time, it has made us even more appreciative of all the hard work that was done at Zaplive to develop and maintain these.

Christian, Markus, and everyone else at Zaplive: Thank you for your efforts during the last couple of years!

But, back now to the new site, the current situation, and what this all means.

As it stands, all WildEarth and producer broadcasts on Zaplive will stop on September 28th, so that the only way to watch our streams will be on the www.wildearth.tv website, on J.TV, or through an embedded player on the content producers' sites.

Also from that date, the archives will unfortunately not be accessible anymore in their current form. The recording will go on, but seekpointing and viewing them will not be possible for a while. We are working hard on a new system, one that needs to be built from scratch, but at this time can not yet tell you exactly when it will be ready. As a subproject we are therefore working on making the Safari.tv game drives accessible for 'time-shifted' watching. I.e. record them in their entirety, so they can be watched later when someone missed them.

One very important point about the archives is that all existing archives as well as the seekpoints that were created for them will be kept, and included in the new system. So all the effort spent on capturing and seek pointing will not be wasted!

Then the two main areas we, and you, have found to be a problem with the new site; the chat rooms and its general behaviour with regard to e.g. resizing windows, navigation, etc. Within WildEarth Interactive (the name of the new partnership between WildEarth Media and PixelProject) we are working full speed on resolving both of these.

It turns out that the chat engine we chose does not cope well with a high number of chatters, which is obviously a problem..., and that the capturing and archiving of the chat history slows the whole chat, and sometimes even the whole PC, down to a crawl. We have looked under the hood of the chat and have tuned the current engine as best as we could for now. While this should improve the situation somewhat, WE clearly "need more power, cap'ain" and are currently working on replacing it with a much more powerful engine, more capable of handling the load and are doing all we can to have this upgrade in place before Zaplive stops broadcasting.

To fix and improve a number of smaller issues on the new site, we are changing the set-up from 100% Flash to a 'regular' html site, with Flash objects on it. This will provide the best of both worlds: The powerful capabilities of Flash with all the familiarity of an html site.

I hope this update, while not providing all the answers, does shed some light on why things happened as and when they did and about what lies ahead. Please feel free to send any questions and remarks to webmaster@wildearth.tv .

-- Peter

WE are very proud.

2010-09-17T09:57:00.000+02:00

The afternoon safari on the 10th September (Friday) was broadcast in 3D ... (as well as 2D). This was another world-first!! So for those of you that were watching the safari you were a part of history in the making ... the very first time that a safari was broadcast in LIVE 3D!! :)

As many of you know, it has been a huge effort, by quite a few people, to make this dream a reality. I thought that I would briefly tell you about some of the key steps that had to be taken and some of the hurdles that we had to overcome.

There are three main areas where pioneering work was required: the 3D rig on the safari vehicle, the Master Control and the video player on the Internet.

Well the decision to start building a LIVE 3D safari broadcast was taken some months ago, and for a while the work all centered around the safari vehicle. Safari.tv had done a 3D test with a rented side-by-side rig, which is simply a plate on which two video cameras are mounted next to each other. This had allowed us to film a few shots in 3D and start getting an understanding for the geometry and what it all means. Some of these 'shots' were loaded up on the WildEarth YouTube channel. However, the big challenge with the rig was to be able to zoom in and out all the while maintaining the 3D effect in such a way that it does not cause headaches or discomfort.

Basically the inter-ocular distance (gap between cameras) and the convergence (toe in of cameras) have to be automatically adjusted based on an algorithm. So Russell Bowden, and his team at 3Drigs.com, built us a motion controlled mirror rig. This rig had to have some elements that are quite unique to our circumstances. We wanted the smallest possible rig, that could withstand 6 hours of bumping and beating on an open 4x4 in the dust and heat of the African bush. We wanted the right 'eye' (right camera) fixed and facing up vertically, so that the mirror could be tilted towards the ground so that glare and reflections would be reduced. The motion control had to be of a super high standard so that very rapid adjustments of the camera geometry could reliably happen while broadcasting LIVE. We chose High Definition industrial block cameras from Sony, because they had integrated lenses and are totally programable and can be controlled externally using the Sony control protocol. The whole system is controlled by an on-board touch screen computer, the software for which was started by the 3Drigs team, but eventually perfected and finished by Alex Voz at safari.tv. The software that controls the rig is ultimately the heart, and brains, of the system. It is this software which ensures that you get to see the scene in 3D without causing discomfort, all the way from a wide shot with the presenter in the foreground to a zoomed in shot of the leopards head. There is still quite a lot of perfecting and tweaking required in this software, but it is in very safe hands ... Alex's.

Then the two video feeds (from the two 'eyes') need to be converted into SDI, the right 'eye' needs to be flipped and flopped (vertical and horizontal flip), they need to be recorded, converged and 'squashed' into a side-by-side frame compatible feed, which looks like this ...

Then the video feed needs to be encoded, modulated and transmitted. This part we already new all about thankfully. The video is then received in the Final Control at safari.tv and re-encoded and streamed from Djuma in South Africa to the WildEarth Master Control in Dublin, Ireland.

This Master Control has been built by Peter Braat (the WE technical director, partner and shareholder). It is an entirely 'cloud based' master control, and possibly one of the first ever built. What that means is that it is built completely in the 'cloud' ... the Internet. There are no people sitting in front of rows of screens controlling what gets sent to our channel clients and viewers on TV, the Internet or iPhones ... it's all written in code and lives on the Internet.

I think it is a pretty impressive system that he has built. The MC (as WE have started calling it) ingests the video from safari.tv at 6 Mbps, which is a very very high bit rate to transport around the globe and has taken an inordinate amount of effort from a whole bunch of other people, but I will let Pete tell that story another time. The MC then archives the stream at full resolution, and plays out the LIVE stream if our schedule (managed by Emily remotely) has us in a LIVE safari time slot. The MC will playout archived safaris to the TV clients if the LIVE safari is not being broadcast. Of course on the Internet WE do not play out non live shows into our LIVE streams.

The MC also transrates the 3D stream down to 1 Mbps for our connected TV partners like ZooVision and LiveStation, down to 500 Kbps for our 3D viewers on the Internet and 150 Kbps for our iPhone viewers watching with their Cinemizers. The MC also does what WE call 'splitting and stretching', which is basically splitting off the right 'eye', from the side-by-side stereo video, and the stretching that 'eye' back to normal frame size. This process creates our 2D feed, which is then transrated to 1 Mbps, 500 Kbps and 150 Kbps for those viewers that either can't or don't want to watch in 3D.

All of these functions are executed in real time and in parallel ... making it a pretty 'busy' Master Control and a pretty size-able achievement.

The next big challenge was being able to convert side-by-side 'frame compatible' stereo video into anaglyph for our Internet viewers. Once again there was nothing 'off the shelf' that WE could use, but thankfully YouTube had already pioneered an anaglyph 3D player so WE had something to copy ... and most importantly we knew it was possible.

WE turned to our new partners at PixelProject and in particular the Flash guru Preston Thomas, who immediately got to work on building a Flash video player from the ground up, that would be able to not only render anaglyph video, but also was ready for Adaptive Streaming (subject of a future Blog) and integrated our new ad serving solution and provided far more real time info about the stream. After a few weeks of hard coding WE had our first look at the PixelPlayer ... version 1.0 is now LIVE on our new site. Basically the player splits the side-by-side stereo video in half (left 'eye' and right 'eye'), then it stretches each eye back to full frame, and colors each frame with a different tint, depending on what the viewer has chosen. So you could select red/green or cyan/magenta or whatever color combination that the glasses that you have need, just like the YouTube player. Then the player overlays these two video feeds in just the right way to make sure that the 3D effect will work on your computer screen. Again this is part science part art, and WE are all very happy with the result that Preston and his team achieved.

So overall it may seem fairly simple but behind the scenes an incredible amount of pioneering work has been going on. I know that some of you have been frustrated by our technical problems, and have said things like 'walk before you run' or that '3D is a waste of time', or had fears that some how WE were going to only focus on 3D and no longer provide 2D, but all of this is not the case. It is really important that WE pioneer this new format for LIVE safaris, not only because it will provide people with an even more immersive experience, but also because it sells!!
As many of you know, the advertising revenue that WE receive on the Internet barely covers the bandwidth costs from our video servers to your computers, let alone all the other costs required to run WE and safari.tv and produce this content. However, if WE could distribute our channel on TV then WE could access sufficient revenue to make our businesses viable ... and 3D is highly in demand in the TV world right now. :)
WE are very proud and excited to say that WE have concluded several long term license deals for our 3DTV channel and 3D safaris. (I will write a Blog about these new partners soon). These license deals have secured WildEarth's and safari.tv's futures and mean that you can expect us to carry on broadcasting, improving and pioneering in the world of LIVE wildlife broadcasting for some years yet.

Thank you all for your support and patience over the past few months. There have been plenty of problems and hurdles that have caused our broadcasts to be less than optimal. There are still a few teething problems, but I expect that within the coming few days a few weeks all of this issues will go away, or at least reduce dramatically.

Written by Graham Wallington

News from Pix Controller

2010-09-16T11:43:00.000+02:00

Bill Powers who owns Pix Controller has been really busy with his Pennsylvanian Woods cameras over the past few months. Below he has written about some interesting sightings and given more info on what is going on. There is some great video to go with it as well. Enjoy and thanks Bill.

Emily

We are now streaming three wildlife cameras and we are starting to see a lot of wildlife activity as summer is ending and cooler temperatures are moving in. One of the most interesting sights we have seen is this whitetail "deer family". For the past four months we have been seeing a buck, doe, and fawn feeding together. This is very odd since the whitetail buck, males, are not monogamous. We had a few theories posted on our Facebook page that the doe and buck may have been birth twins and reunited for the summer. In any case this was a rare event to view for such a long period of time. However, the whitetail breeding season is about to get underway and we suspect this family will break up soon.

Deer Family Video:

http://www.youtube.com/pixcontroller#p/u/9/9Jao1_t7tr0

Another interesting sighting was a fawn that bedded down in front of wildlife camera #2 one afternoon. The fawn was caught sleeping for several hours. On occasion we have seen deer bed close to our main PTZ camera, but only for brief periods of time. It was a real treat to have the fawn bed so close to the camera for the viewers to watch.

Fawn Bedded Video:

http://www.youtube.com/pixcontroller#p/u/5/KwRAgXqSh64

Although the bird nesting season has come to an end in our area we did notice that something built a nest in one of our large nest boxes. We installed a camera in the nest box and found that a gray squirrel was sleeping there occasionally at night. We have the camera signal running back to webcam base station, and when we see the nest is occupied we switch the feed from wildlife camera #3 to broadcast the nest box. Typically the squirrel will sleep in the nest box about once a week, and just for the night time hours.

Squirrel In Nest Box Video:

http://www.youtube.com/pixcontroller#p/u/0/nRdJPyeOmIw

The wild turkey are back. We didn't see any flocks of hens with poults this summer. However, lately we have seen a flock of hens and grown poults regularly on wildlife camera #1 and #2. We have also been seeing a bachelor group of Tom, male, turkey feeding on several of the remote motion-activated cameras.

Bachelor Group of Turkey Feeding video:

http://www.youtube.com/pixcontroller#p/u/1/Q1wV66NLJMA

Written by Bill Powers

A brand new web site.

2010-09-10T12:30:00.000+02:00

Hi again,

Almost a week has gone by since my first blog on 'Ringo' on the Safari.TV blog and a lot has happened since then. So time for the next one, on the WildEarth.TV blog this time. (Just to keep everyone guessing ;-)

The main event for the week has obviously been the launch of the new site, which, although certainly not 100% perfect, I think has gone fairly well. We've received lots of feedback and are working our way through this to first fix those things that do not work as they should and then start making the site better by modifying and adding features.

This is a huge amount of work (as was the creation of the site) and will probably never be truly finished. I think it is therefore high time I introduce the people behind the scenes. WE have partnered with a company called PixelPr oject, based in Cape Town and owned and run by Preston Thomas and Rahle Dusheiko. Preston is the technical wizard, while Rahle has been working her magic on the look and content side of things. This new site is not simply a once-off project for them, but part of a long-term partnership with us and they will continue to maintain, expand and improve the site. We believe this is a win-win-win situation for WE, PixelProject AND all our viewers!

Now, if I would try to summarise your feedback so far in one sentence I think it might go something like this: "The new site looks great, but where are the archives and could you change ... on the new chat room?"

To the first WE would simply like to say 'Thank you' and forward the compliments to Rahle, Preston and the rest of the PixelProject team. The second and third parts require a somewhat more detailed response.

Firstly, the archives. To paraphrase a favourite action here of mine: "They'll be back!", and bringing them back has the highest priority now that the site has launched. One important point to note is that while the archives are currently not accessible on the new site, the recording continues so no sightings will be lost.

Also, as those of you who've used the archives, and especially those that have been creating seek points/hotspots know, the 'old' system was not very user-friendly. Therefore it would not do to simply try to rebuild it as it was. This is a unique opportunity to come back with something much better, more intuitive, something user-friendly and simply plain fun to use! More information on this will follow soon.

Then on to the third part, and the area we received the most feedback on; the chat rooms. The amount of feedback on this feature shows once more how important these are! Preston has been keeping a close eye on them and the feedback about them and has already started working on ironing out some of the glitches you've reported. Most of them should therefore disappear over the coming couple of days.

Finally I want to thank everyone who has sent us feedback, and ask that "y'all" keep doing so. There is only so much that can be tested and prepared beforehand, and also our ideas might not always match your preferences or actual experiences. So hearing back from you about what you like and don't like, and about what does not work as it should, is extremely valuable and much appreciated. To make sure your comments and suggestions end up in the right place, please send them all to webmaster @ wildearth.tv.

-- Peter

Operation Migration 2010

2010-09-09T12:15:00.000+02:00

As most of you will know the Crane Cam launched again this year on August 5th 2010 sponsored by Duke Energy. It is fantastic to have these beautiful birds to watch again as they go about their day to day training before they leave on migration on October 1st. This is the target date at the moment but due to recent bad weather this may be set back.

Nacedah National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1939 as a breeding grounds and Sanctuary for the only eastern migrating population of Whooping Cranes. From mid August to the beginning of October they train the birds for their migration. They take to the air whenever the weather is good and lead the flock on circuits around the refuge to get them familiar with what will become their summer home for the rest of their lives. When the birds are young and inexperienced they fly low and more slowly in case they drop out of the sky.

There were only 13 chicks this years and so they were split into two cohorts rather than three. At the moment the cam shows early morning training sessions and also interactions in the pen during the day. By the middle of August a group of eight young cranes in cohort one were already flying well with the trike. Cohort one is getting very strong now and cohort two is not far behind. There is only three weeks left until they launch but unfortunately the weather is not playing the game. During the month of August it was good weather and they flew most days. There was a lot of fog but this would quickly clear enabling them to go out. However, September is a different story. There have been a few storms already, one that knocked the camera out. At the moment they are only flying every three or four days.

WE look forward to following this years migration and seeing how these thirteen chicks do on their maiden voyage. I would like to share a story with you that I read on their site which is very cute. Normally the chicks are named by numbers. However they have named one of them Zoey 'flower child' Woodstock. This is because she is crazy about flowers. In that area there are a lot of purple clovers and she is obsessed by them. She attacks them and eats them pulling them out one by one. The Woodstock names comes about because she is very spacey and always running around after flowers. So the name Zoey flower child Woodstock was born.

For more information on Operation Migration 2010 log on to www.operationmigration.org and follow their daily blog.

Written by Emily Wallington

A very sad ending to the 2010 Hornby Island Eagles Nest Season

2010-07-15T11:07:00.000+02:00

This morning news reached us from Hornby Island that the single eaglet in the nest, Phoenix, unfortunately did not survive.This was a great shock to us and the many, many people that have been following this bald eagle's nest over the last several months.

As Phoenix' conditions worsened over the last couple of days, plans were being made to take Phoenix from the nest to have him examined at the Mountainnaire Animal Rehabiliation Center.

Such an extrication is not easy. It requires permits on the one side, and experienced tree-climbers on the other. They need to know how to deal with a sick eaglet as well as with protective parents that might not like their baby being taken away from the nest, all while high up in a tree. Sadly it proved impossible to get everything in place in time for Phoenix.

In mythology, a phoenix is an immortal bird that, when it dies, bursts into flames and is reborn from its own ashes. "To rise from the ashes of the phoenix" means to make a miraculous comeback. Because the cameras had been resurrected by the Hornby Eagle group with the help of WildEarth, it was decided that the eaglet would be named "Phoenix."

I am sure that Phoenix will also live on in the memories of the many that watched his every move. Hopefully the following two short clips will help with that:

On Thursday, April 29th an adorable eaglet emerged from one of the eggs. Watch it here.

At one point Phoenix pooped on one of the cameras lenses and it was feared that the close-up shots would not be seen. Watch it here. Fortunately the wind and rain cleaned up Phoenix's dirty deed.

More information on the 2010 Hornby eagles nesting season and how things will continue from here, can be found at the Hornby Eagles Forums and Website:

Forums - http://www.ournaturezone.com

Website - http://www.hornbyeagles.com

Water is flowing in Dixie again!!

2010-06-23T14:55:00.000+02:00

For several months the people of Dixie have been without clean water. Now Dixie, for those of you that don't know, is a small village (less than 300 households) just outside Gowrie Gate, the Sabi Sands, South Africa, and is home to Patrick (safari.tv presenter) and lots of our friends like Rexon, Taxon and many of the staff at Djuma.

Its quite difficult to appreciate just how hard life is without clean running water when you live in a 'first world' city like Johannesburg, or in a 'western' country like the United States. You can't properly wash your clothes or yourself. You can't grow crops, so food is scarce. Its unhealthy for kids, and adults, to drink dam water, and cooking with this water is also a bad idea ... but if you have no alternative, that is what you are forced to do.

A few months ago the borehole pump broke. Technically this is the responsibility of the municipality to repair, but they lack the resources, and Dixie is far far away from any of the major towns and therefore quite easy to ignore. Not to mention the fact that there has been a battle raging for control of the land on which Dixie is situated and which rightly belongs to the community.

Every day the people of Dixie, predominantly the woman, have to wake up long before dawn and walk into the bush down to the dam and fill wheel barrows with dirty, muddy water and bring it back to the village. It has been a very very tough period of time.

Finally, after a great deal of effort WE managed to figure out what was wrong with the mono pump (it is an ancient system that few people know anything about). Emily then began the process of getting a new pump manufactured, based on the specifications given to us by the municipality. It took forever to get made in Johannesburg and find its way down to Mpumulanga, and cost a fair packet as well.

When it finally did arrive, we got in touch with Chris Dreyer, a local legend that has done a lot of the building in the Sabi Sands, and has been taking care of the safari.tv and Vuyatela septic tanks and drains for years. He also happens to be one of the only people (other than my father), that I know, who knows anything about mono pumps at all. He made several trips to Dixie and met up with Rex, and they began to slowly get the old pump out of the ground.

When they finally got all the 'rotten' pipe and the pump out of the ground, they discovered that WE had had the wrong pump manufactured!! We were all devastated and nobody more than Rex, who has been working so hard on this project, with so many obstacles to overcome.

There was nothing for it ... WE sourced and purchased another pump, this time the correct one. WE also had to find all the necessary pipe and other items to be able to reinstall the pump. You see the thing with these mono pumps is that if you do not get it put back in correctly it will rip itself apart and once again Dixie would be without clean water.

Chris returned to Dixie with his team and began the slow and arduous process of reinstalling the pump. Finally, a few days ago the people had clean water!!!!

The impact on the lives of the people of Dixie by this event cannot be overstated. This evening safari.tv and Herman Gerber will be hosting a Fire Side Chat at 18h30 CAT (16h30 GMT, 09h30 Pacific and 12h30 East Coast) where Patrick and Rexon will be discussing the difficulties that the village faced not having clean water and how grateful they are to the WildEarth.TV audience for donating the money necessary to solving this situation. Herman and Alex have also produced a short video about the whole process of getting Water to Dixie, which they will show during the Fire Side Chat tonight.

The money used to get this pump replaced and reinstalled was donated by the WildEarth audience last year, and although it was originally intended to provide fresh running water to every household in Dixie, WE felt that it was the right decision to get fresh water to these people now.

The project to provide a tap at each home in Dixie is still forefront of our minds. WE have managed to secure most of the permissions necessary to start this project up again. You see, WE can't raise the money (and we need at least $30,000) to build an engineering plan (so we know the actual cost), purchase all the piping and pay a contractor to come in and reticulate the whole village, until WE can guarantee the donors that we won't be stopped before completion. There are many feuding political factions surrounding this tiny village. The feuds relate to land, as they always do, and development of this village is used as a 'weapon' between the various groups. Essentially one or another authority will veto any development, unless they get what they want ... the land which rightly belongs to the people and community of Dixie. However, WE are very very close now, and hopefully quite soon WE will be able to announce that this project is back on track.

It is though supporting the communities that surround the islands of wilderness that we stand any chance in conserving what little natural heritage we have left. If these communities can feel tangible results in their lives for not poaching and not over grazing these conservation areas, if they can value the fact that people like you watch their natural heritage from afar, then maybe they will see the value in conservation.

So on behalf of WE, the wildlife and above all the people of Dixie, I would like to thank Chris Dreyer, Rexon Ntimane, Laeveld Bou in Hoedspruit, the safari.tv team and most of all you our dedicated viewers for helping this village in such an incredible way. You are all angels. WEangels. Its in your nature.

Written by Graham Wallington

House Wren evicts Tufted Titmouse

2010-05-11T10:58:00.000+02:00

Pix Controller are now streaming a nest box camera. This spring they engaged in a nest box project where they built and set up 6 different nest boxes in different sizes and in different, all wild, habitats. This way it is hoped the boxes will attract a verity of birds throughout the nesting season. The camera system will be moved around to different nest boxes as they become active.

Within the first week of setting the nest boxes out they had a bird start a nest in one of the smaller boxes. It turned out to be a tufted titmouse. They quickly installed a camera to and started streaming the nest building process. The titmouse nest, however, was under constant raids by a house wren. The house wren is a smaller bird and will often try and remove competitive birds from their territory. After several weeks the titmouse nest was complete and the female laid a clutch of 6 eggs. After a few days of incubation the house wren returned, destroyed the eggs, are removed most of the titmouse nest. At this point the titmouse pair was unable to defend the nesting site and didn't return.

The house wren didn't waste any time and started constructing a nest. The male house wren will construct several nests filling up as many potential nesting sites as possible to eliminate competition. The male will then take the female to each nest and she will choose the nest to lay her eggs. The male will build the base of the nest with sticks and the female will construct a cut made of soft material such as fur to hold the eggs/chicks. We are now seeing and hearing both pairs at the nest box and we assume this is the nest the female has chosen to lay the eggs.

The camera system installed at this nest box is rather unique. They designed and built a dual camera system. The inside camera is active until a bird is present at the entrance hole. At this time a motion sensor will detect the bird and automatically switch the view to an outside camera for as long as the bird is present at the outside. There is a sound MIC installed too along with an IR camera to view the birds at night inside the nest box. We hope this 2nd camera will help with the education of the nesting process.

Here's a video example of the cameras in action:

http://www.youtube.com/pixcontroller#p/u/0/GEIo5nC_T9E

WE are still here after 3 years ... :)

2010-04-27T22:22:00.000+02:00

Well today is Freedom day here in South Africa. The day that our country had the first fully democratic election in which all South Africans could vote back in 1994. It is also the anniversary of the first LIVE safari broadcast from Djuma by WildEarth in 2007.
Technically it's not really WE's birthday, as WE had been operating at Djuma from September 2006 (preparing all the systems), WE were incorporated in August 2006, and the domain name (www.wildearth.tv) was registered in December 2005.
It's also not the first anniversary of the first LIVE safaris ever broadcast, as that accolade goes to AfriCam, when we did the first VGD (Virtual Game drive) in 1999, and the first streaming video game drives in 2001.
However, today is an emotional day for us. Not only because our whole country is celebrating democracy, but also because today WE can proudly say that for 3 whole years we have broadcast 2 LIVE safaris every day. Well almost every day ... about 98% of the days. :) As many of you know, this has taken a monumental effort from many many people. It is a huge achievement, of which WE are all very proud.
From those early days on the Tank with Nick and Helen (pictured above), WE have endured many challenges. Some have been obvious to all like the limited access to viewers (80 slots), the technical difficulties with the Tank and the broadcast equipment, not to mention the loss of some very well loved crew and friends. Some of the challenges WE have faced have been less obvious like the loss of our primary revenue source and client, Telkom Media, and the financial challenges of employing a full time team at Djuma and broadcasting these immersive safari experiences to a global audience.
What has always kept us going has been a combination of the passion to share our wild places and the support from you our loyal viewer family. I can proudly say that today, 3 years on, our loyal family of supporters has grown substantially and our passion to share our WildEarth burns ever brighter ... it's in our nature.

Crisis With Horned Owl Cam

2010-04-21T13:58:00.000+02:00

The camera on Minnesota Bound’s Horned Owl cam has failed and now they are faced with a number of problems to replace it. Minnie and Sota are the adult owls and they will not leave this nest as they are extremely over protective of their children. The US Fish and Wildlife Service had to give permission to the MN Bound folk to go up there and replace the camera as it may have been considered as disturbing the nest. However, permission was granted. Finally, due to recent floods the ground is too soft for a boom truck and so someone will have to climb the 75 foot high tree.

Climbing brings with it a number of issues. Not only is it dangerous from a height point of view and will need someone who is an experienced climber but there is a likely chance of them being attacked by Minnie. Females are bigger than males, so they take on the duty of nest protection. According to Dr. C. Stuart Houston, who has banded over 7,000 Great Horned Owl chicks, something like 7% of all females will physically attack the tree climber. Too many people have scars from protective mother owls, and a few have lost eyes. Not to mention the risk of being knocked out of a tree while you're 75 feet up in the air.... Whoever does this HAS to know what they're doing!

Karla Kinstler ‘the owl lady’ http://www.mnbound.com/karlas-owl-blog/ has contacted the Raptor centre at the University of Minnesota to see if she can find anyone suitable for the job. They have given her the name of someone so we hope this pays off. She has also suggested that the camera is replaced with a camera with night vision and audio so that it can be the first ever streaming Great Horned Owl cam with a day/night camera and audio. Watch this space!

The White Spirit Bear

2010-04-04T11:31:00.001+02:00

As you can see one of our new cameras is a bear. This is a Kermode Bear and is named after Francis Kermodei, former director of the Royal B.C. Museum. Local Folks often call it a White Bear or Ghost Bear. Spirit Bear is a more recent name for the White Bear. This is appropriate for a bear that is known for it’s elusive, ghostly yet sweet nature.

This Bear is named Apollo by a pair of B.C. hikers who found his den last year and are responsible for the live feed in his den. He looks comfy and cozy in his winter home, for now anyway. Apollo watchers should be ready though, as the warm weather continues in British Columbia, he may soon be considering his spring stretch.

This camera is brought to you by The Hancock Wildlife Foundation and for more information on him and Spirit Bears in general log onto www.bcspiritbear.com. BCSpiritBear.com is a team of Spirit Bear lovers, who trek about the Great Bear Rainforest searching for opportunities to film, photograph and map the rare and precious White Kermode Spirit Bear. The Great Bear Rainforest is in the Pacific Northwest of British Columbia and is a protected area for these rare bears. Check out the first ever map of Spirit Bear Sightings in the Great Bear Rainforest. http://bcspiritbear.com/site-map/spirit-bear-sighting-map/

This rare White Bear is actually a Black Bear like Lily! Scientists are actively studying this rare genetic trait that is possibly due to a recessive gene, or could be due to a result of a concentration of gene in a given area. The Spirit Bear is not an albino.

Scientists estimate there are 1,200 black and white Kermode bears in the coast area that stretches from around the northern tip of Vancouver Island northwards to the Alaska panhandle. On Gribbell Island, up to 30 per cent of the bears can be white while on the larger Princess Royal Island, about 10 per cent have the white coat.

The Pittsburgh Falcons have laid their eggs!

2010-03-23T11:30:00.000+02:00

For those of you who are devoted followers of Pittsburgh’s peregrine families led by Louie and Tasha2 at the Gulf Tower and Dorothy and E2 at the Cathedral of Learning in Oakland, this year you will be given an even more intimate view of the birds as they hatch and raise their young.
On March 17th Tasha2, the female peregrine at the Gulf Tower nest laid her first egg.
Dorothy the female peregrine falcon at The Cathedral of Learning nest laid her first a week before and has since laid two more making a total of three.
Chicks will hatch about 30 days after the eggs are laid," says Dr. Todd Katzner, Director of Conservation and Field Research at the National Aviary. "Three to four weeks after hatching, the chicks will be banded by the Pennsylvania Game Commission and given a full medical exam.
On March 20th the cameras at the Gulf Tower Nest, PA caught some LIVE peregrine falcon courtship. It is very interesting and you can watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm6VWqmjo2g
Live video streams via cameras installed at nests in both locations will this year provide sharper, and more focused views of the birds. The cameras were installed by PixController and the images and sounds they collect are streamed by WildEarth.tv to the National Aviary web site, providing real-time web tv images accessible world-wide. FalconCam footage at both sites can be accessed via the National Aviary web site: www.aviary.org/falcon or here on www.wildearth.tv.
Come and get to know the birds, it promises to be a real time peregrine soap opera.

News from safari.tv

2010-03-11T18:24:00.000+02:00

Well the new crew has been in camp since the beginning of March and slowly things are beginning to settle down. There have been many teething problems and they are all working very hard to iron them out and bring you the safaris that we all love so much.

Tomorrow morning the drive times will be changing. With the seasons changing, the days getting shorter and Djuma taking the lead that time has come. AM drives will start at 06H00, PM drives start at 15H30 and Night drives / FSCs at 19H00.

The waterhole has been buzzing with large amounts of game. From Nyala, Impala herds, and Warthog families to Elephant herds and the seemingly resident Buffalo. Hippos have been mating and there is a brand new baby which appeared a few days ago, which has been very exciting. They are still trying to decide on a name and suggestions are welcome.

The last couple of days have also been a hive of activity with all sorts of sightings on the drives. They found the Nkuhuma Lionesses on a Kudu kill where they stayed for a day feeding. The Nkuhumas have stayed in the area since then so the lion viewing has been fantastic and a nice addition to the other stuff over the last few days.

There has also been some great viewing of White Rhinos and Buffalo and recently some hyena activity around the dam with whooping at night being picked up on the waterhole cam. Luckily no one is presently sleeping in the room next to the FCC! There have actually been lots of Hyena around during the day recently and some people think that there might be a new den site being set up somewhere by these individuals.

On Wednesday the weather was much hotter than previous days and on the morning drive with Kathryn and Jared they had an amazing sighting of Karula and her 2 boys. They were truly excited to meet our resident leopard family and are looking forward to getting to know them like the rest of us have over the years.

Last night Herman and Patrick sat around the fire for a Fireside Chat to talk about some Shangaan traditions and cooking etc and made some pap and sauce on the fire which we have heard was very tasty to sample afterwards.

Finally, Alex and Caroline drove through to Johannesburg to collect the new Sony Camera and edit suite on Tuesday which is now up and running. We are all very excited about the upgrade and hope to bring a much better quality picture to you very soon.

Minnesota Bound Eagle Nest

2010-03-07T14:06:00.000+02:00

The Minnesota Bound Bald Eagle nest is located in central Minnesota, USA, less than 30 yards from the flowing waters of the Crow River. Our pair is in their 3rd year at this nesting site. This nest is relatively young by Bald Eagle terms and is roughly 3 x 3 ft, made out of twigs, brush and other eagle friendly bedding.

Working through the harsh Minnesota winter, the eagles start rebuilding their nest in early February, preparing to lay their eggs in March. We anticipate from 1 to 4 eggs, but 2 is fairly typical. Incubation typically takes about 35 days and once the chicks are born, you will see every aspect of raising the young and a close-up view into bald eagle parenting.

Minnesota Bound is a popular Minnesota based television show that has now been on the air for 16 years. They highlight anything and everything to do with the Midwest outdoor lifestyle. Hosted by Ron Schara and his love able black lab Raven, these two have shared thousands of stories. From unique animals to incredible characters, they’ve covered nearly everything. They’ve had an interest in web cams for the past 4 years and their most popular one thus far has been the live loon cam. They really enjoy bringing nature to everyone, LIVE. Their dream is to continue growing the amount of camera’s they have placed and to give several great experiences throughout the entire year.

Ron Schara Productions is a production suite based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. They currently produce 9 television shows locally, regionally and nationally. They have won many awards and they pride themselves on being the leader in outdoor variety television.

To give you the ultimate learning experience, they have teamed up with the Bald Eagle experts from the National Eagle Center, from Wabasha, MN, to give detailed updates and daily blogs. You can ask them questions or just learn from the world’s authority on Bald Eagles.

the winds of change are blowing ...

2010-03-03T01:04:00.000+02:00

Firstly I must apologise that I have not written to you all like this in a while. It is not that I have not wanted to, but rather that I have been super busy working on the next steps in our journey to bring you our WildEarth LIVE ... which as you know is in my (and our) nature.

Anyway, I wanted to take the time to explain what is happening at WE, both from a corporate perspective and from the perspective of certain individuals.

Firstly, I ask that you work with us as WE change and grow. In the past few days I have received some very disturbing mails, and heard about comments, from people that I would have thought would have had more trust and faith in WE. I personally ask you all to remember that a number of new people have joined us. At the same time a new company has been formed ... safari.tv ... a new leader has stepped into the breach, and all of this will bring change. This will be good, but there will be rocky moments along the way. I ask that you do not stand on the side lines and throw insults and say: "Oh, this is not how it used to be done", but rather role up your sleeves, get involved and remember that this has never been about you and us ... it has always been about WE.

And WE need you now. WE need you to support the new crew, the new leaders and the new ideas that will be born of this era. There will be mistakes, and no doubt they will grate, but I ask that you rise above the frustration and not judge, but help. That you do not forget that WE are a family, and these are new members and they should be WElcomed correctly. I trust that I can count on you to help our new members feel WElcome and to help them appreciate, in a positive way, who WE are.

From the people perspective, Rex and Siphiwe are still 100% a part of WE! I know that you have been worried about this, and I would be too.

Siphiwe is coming back to work towards the end of March and will be 'zooming' the waterhole camera between safaris as per normal. Her daughter is soooo beautiful and growing like a weed. I am sure that you will see her (and her mom) in the new Final Control later this month.

Rexon, on the other hand, you will not see much of. He has become a 'big man' in his village of Dixie. In fact he has changed the course of history in South Africa. Our very own Rexon through his tireless work on behalf of his community has influenced the constitution of South Africa to respect the property rights of the down trodden.

A ruling has been passed down that the land is for the benefit of all, and cannot be controlled by the traditional leaders to the detriment of the individuals. In addition, Rexon has been a key player in the group who won a landmark case in the land claims court in favor of the Dixie community over the Manyaleti Reserve, to the north of the Sabi Sands.

As I write this mail, Rex is leading a delegation of 15 elders in Johannesburg where he is trying to get the constitutional court to pass the power to 'control' this land from the tradiotnal leadership to the people. This is a very important and groundbreaking development in the history of the people of South Africa.

Amandla!! (Power to the people)

So to cut a long story short, Rex is moving to a higher plain. His calling will be to empower his people, and WE will support him 100%! He may show up on our channel from time to time, and he will certainly be behind the scenes. Whenever you see an increase in our traversing area, or read of rural people being empowered to control their own destiny, there you will feel Rex's hand. He is still an employee of WE, and is working with me on some very exciting developments that cannot yet be shared, but I assure you involve more and more of what you love ... LIVE wildlife.

He has been my friend for the past 10 years. He has been there through some difficult and 'weird' times, when friends were few and times were tough. He will remain a part of WE until he needs to fly free to change the world.

Written by Graham Wallington

Changes in WE

2010-03-02T10:14:00.001+02:00

As WE move from the heat of summer into the beauty of Autumn, WildEarth is also changing. Some of you will have watched the Fire Side Chat on Sunday night in which Graham announced a whole lot of things that are going on and also introduced you to a bunch of new people. For those of you who missed it, check it out on our archives.

Will Fox will be taking over the day to day management of the Safari side of our business at Djuma, as a partner in the new Safari.tv LIVE production company. He will run the daily safaris, manage the crew and make sure that you get the best immersive safari experience that anyone can offer. His wife Carol will be behind the scenes running the unpleasant yet nonetheless crucial stuff such as finances and scheduling.

We have five new staff members, four who have already started. Kathryn and Jared are a couple who have had a huge amount of bush experience but also carry some great creative skill. Both are fantastic at camera and Jared is a seriously experienced guide. Together they will take the bush by storm and will be the next wildlife film couple to hit the industry.

Caroline Samules is a TV expert with many many years of producing experience in the LIVE space. She will keep the team together and make sure that once again you get the best African adventure out there.

Alexander Voz is an IT specialist with a flair for editing. He will be creating non live highlights for you and never again will you not able to catch up on what has happened in the last 24 hours.

Finally Tara Pirie will be joining us on 12th March. She will also be presenting and her knowledge and enthusiasm is second to none. She will be a fantastic addition and a real honour to finally have a girl presenting on WE!!

Kathryn will be writing a regular blog on blog.safari.tv so don't miss it. I will still update you here as to what is going on over there at safari.tv, as well as with all the other WE producers, but if you want regular updates then go there.

Pieter and Lieschen are Leaving

2010-02-16T10:48:00.000+02:00

As most of you will know by now Pieter and Lieschen will be leaving the WildEarth crew at the end of this month. They have decided it is time to move on with their lives, get married and set up home in Namibia.

Pieter has been with us since the first time we went LIVE in April 2007 but also for months before that whilst setting up. Firefighting well into the early hours of the morning to try and get a fire under control is something I am sure he will never forget. Erecting an 75 foot mast at "Hell's Gate" is also something that sticks in all of our minds. In the searing heat of the midday sun we tried to make this thing stand up straight but alas it wasn’t going to happen easily. After Pieter had stripped his hands of any skin and mind of any sense of humor it finally worked.

WildEarth has grown significantly since the days of camp building, signal problems and only "80 seats" on ‘The Tank’ and Pieter has played a large part in this. He has been with us since the beginning and through thick and thin played a huge role. His fantastic photography has been a huge asset to WildEarth and also his ability to immerse a global audience in an African adventure.

At the end of 2008 Lieschen started to work for WildEarth and although many of the earlier problems had been ironed out, she still has her work cut out solving issues. She took to bush life like a fish to water and has since been a sturdy team player in our mission to bring LIVE wildlife to the world.

These two will be sorely missed by many people. The crew and management here at WildEarth wish them the best of luck with their future endeavour’s and hope that they will always remain part of the WE extended family. WE hope you make very happy families together and remember that you will forever be a part of WE.

Below are some of the video highlights that Pieter chose for the Fire Side Chat last night. Well done to all of our creative viewers for making these and a big thank you for the great entertainment.

Wildearth Video by Valorie (May 8th 2008)

http://wildearth.ning.com/video/video/show?id=2094372:Video:376&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_video

Wildearth Viewers by Valorie (November 22nd 2009)

http://wildearth.ning.com/video/video/show?id=2094372:Video:273004&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_video

A Millipede Goes to the Moon by Claire M (December 1st 2009)

http://wildearth.ning.com/video/video/show?id=2094372:Video:275769&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_video

Weekly Highlight at Wildearth by Sagresta (June 8th 2008)

http://wildearth.ning.com/video/video/show?id=2094372:Video:15599&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_video

Eagle Season starts soon.

2010-01-27T18:57:00.001+02:00

As you can see on our site we have a number of eagle nests LIVE that are waiting for eagles to arrive and lay their eggs. The Hancock Wildlife Foundation have two nests at the moment. One called Sidney and one called Delta. The Hornby Island Eagle cam which is sponsored by Doug and Sheila Carrick is also waiting for the Eagles to land. We have spoken to Danny who works closely with the Hornby Eagles and he has given us an approximate schedule for what should be happening over the next few months. More can be found at http://www.hornbyeagles.com and http://www.hancockwildlife.org.

MATING - Think of St Valentine’s Day, February 14 (a suitable time for mating) – but include the two weeks before and after this date – in other words, the whole month of February. Eagles are also seen mating in the first half of March, just a week or two before laying eggs But at no other times in the year.

FINAL NEST PREPARATION - A second flurry of nest-preparation takes place from mid-February to mid-March – adding more branches, followed by soft materials like dry grass and moss.

EGG LAYING - March 25, plus or minus one week. A second egg 2 or 3 days later.

BROODING – The male and female take turns sitting on the eggs for approximately 35 days – from March 25 to May 1, plus or minus one week. One could consider the month of April as the “brooding” month.

CHICKS HATCH - May 1, plus or minus one week.

CHICK DEVELOPMENT - Peeps can be heard by June 10 - Sitting on edge of nest by June 20 - Flapping wings by June 25 - Flapping and Jumping by July 10

FIRST FLIGHT - July 25, plus or minus one week. (85 days after hatching)

Great Videos from over time

2010-01-18T08:23:00.000+02:00

Many of you will have seen Pieter Fire Side chat from last night where he played some great videos made by you, the viewers. The quality and creativeness of the videos made by you never cease to astound me. They really are incredible and WE thanks you for putting so much time and energy into them so that everyone else can enjoy them.

Elephant Video by Banditt

Well what can I say, this is truly creative. The black and white picture with fast pans and handy cam feel gives it a truly modern feeling and is incredibly funky. I think the Michael Jackson music goes brilliantly and love the constant two shots of elephants and people. All together it looks like an extremely creative advert mixed with a home video - brilliant. Well done Bandit, you have yet to make a bad video.

All in a day by David Keen.

Thanks David for this lovely feel good video. It truly captures the beauty of the African bush and the music is so therapeutic. Its the kid of video you want to watch when you are having a bad day. It also shows the sheer extent of things to see in the bush in one day. Great.

Looking Back by David Keen

Karula and her two cubs Induna and Mixo have become part of the furniture on WildEarth. This video shows when they had just been born and I agree with Dave, it seems like yesterday. WE have literally been with them every step of the way as they have grown up. This video is great as it shows many different instances where we have seen this family and some where they have been very close to the vehicle. It will stay with us forever and add to the history of these wonderful cubs. Thanks Dave.

Oldie by Edpbs

This video is a lot of fun and very enjoyable to watch. However, the creativeness is brilliant. The fact that you have graded it to look like it was filmed in a different decade is great. I also love the editing and especially the use of speed. Brilliant, well done on an extremely well produced video.

Vervets Alarmed by FCC monitors by Peter Braat.

This is classic. Our resident vervet monkeys are scared of the leopard on the screen in the FCC. Our FCC has big glass wondows and they sit on the fence outide the room and alarm call at the monitors. It gives me a good idea. lets record a picture of a leopard, play it on a loop and put it on a big screen in the camp. Hopefully we will never have any problems with these pesky monkey's again! Thanks Pete for recording this, very funny.

Happy New Year from Pix Controller

2010-01-14T10:30:00.001+02:00

Pix Controller had another female turkey, a hen, with a beard appear on the main camera several weeks ago. The male, or Tom's, have a "beard" consisting of modified feathers that show out from the breast, and also rear spurs on their lower legs used for fighting. The hen seen this month had both a beard and spurs on her legs. Seeing a female bird with these features is extremely uncommon. They showed this video clip to the PA Game Commission and received this comment; "with the right amount of hormones and DNA anything is possible". Here is the video clip:

http://www.youtube.com/user/PixController#p/u/4/-m227UfwuRs

On New Years Eve they had a real treat. In the evening when they typically have a lot of whitetail deer activity on the main camera they had a trophy class whitetail buck make an appearance. Seeing a buck like this in the wild is a once in a life time sighting for most people. It was thrilling that he showed up in the early evening when so many people were tuned into the webcam to see him live. Video clip here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/PixController#p/u/2/MhJroA6ymgU

Up until recently they have been seeing a Great-Horned Owl feeding on the carcass camera. However, when a rather cold spell hit them the carcass camera became rather quiet. When the owl has been feeding he's been on the carcass for 2-3 hours in the late evening until early morning. They expect to start seeing a lot of activity from Red Fox on the carcass camera when they start to den up next month. Last year the red fox were often seen every night on the carcass camera once they were paired up and in their dens.

The picture at the top is the staff at Pix Controller at work in the work shop and the picture below is the man behind Pix Controller - Bill Powers. Bill provided the audio and streaming equipment for Lily the Bear.

Lily the black bear.

2010-01-09T12:57:00.000+02:00

For those of you that have not noticed WE are now LIVE from a black bear den near Ely in Northeastern Minnesota, USA, less than 30 miles from the Canadian border.

If you look under the video player on the home page we have added this stream to all the other LIVE streams. It is amazing.

The bear that you can see is a wild hibernating female black bear named Lily. Researchers say that there is a better than average chance of her giving birth to cubs around mid Jan. Lily is the 2-year-old daughter from June’s second litter. June will turn 9 in the middle of January. June’s mother Shadow will turn 20 at the same time. Shadow, the grandmother of Lily, is the matriarch of the bear clan that lives in this area. Bears seldom use the same den two years in a row. Last winter, Lily hibernated just 72 yards from her den of this winter.

Lily is part of a long-term study of black bear ecology and behavior being conducted by the North American Bear Center (www.bear.org) and the Wildlife Research Institute (www.bearstudy.org) near Ely, Minnesota. Lily is still within her mother’s territory, so if she has cubs it will be interesting to see how everything works out after the bears emerge from their dens in April.

Please log into facebook and become a friend of Lily the black bear. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lily-the-Black-Bear/263755115498?ref=ts

The birth of bear cubs has never been filmed in the wild. Doug Hajicek who is a film and video producer is making his second attempt in conjunction with the North American Bear Centre (www.bear.org).

His first attempt was in 1999 but no cubs were born. Whiteheart was the female bear and she captured the hearts and minds of many. Viewers watched her through a web feed on Discovery.com and although they were filled with anticipation the time passed for her to have cubs.

Doug has joined with Bill Powers from Pix Controller Inc who has provided all the streaming video and audio technology and now they have turned on the new Lily web cam. Hajiceks team also includes biologists Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield from the North American bear centre.

You can witness Lily's 24/7 activities. The camera will broadcast color by day and infra-red images at night. A motion-sensor will trigger video and sound transmission when there is activity. Otherwise, it will send still images.

Drawing from their experience, Rogers and Hajicek note that “it’s astounding how active hibernating bears are in their dens.” Before a den cam allowed them to watch an undisturbed bear, they thought hibernating bears simply slept. They will maintain the den cam throughout the winter of 2010.

Doug Hajicek is a Wildlife expert and Film maker and is currently the producer of MonsterQuest series on the History Channel. Hajicek has put cameras on wild, boars, dogs, in a Beaver Lodge, at the bottom of Lake Superior and on wild rats. His most successful camera was put on a Humboldt squid that acted like a Trojan and filmed the first wild free swimming squid In History. It was over 54 ft long. Hajicek is a Camera inventor and works with Wildlife and Tech experts from all over the world trying to peer into hidden Worlds.

June and Lily and Lynn Rogers will all be featured in Bearwalker of the Northwoods, a 1-hour documentary to air on Animal Planet in late 2010

News from Operation Migration

2009-12-03T21:01:00.001+02:00

Operation Migration have had many hurdles, most of them being weather. They are progressing well but much slower than last year and certainly slower than they would have liked. Today is day 49 and they are only 350 miles South. The entire migration is 1285 miles so they still have a very long way to go. Today it was 26F at 4am in the morning but felt considerably colder with the wind chill. Surface winds were swinging back and forth between West and North and blowing strongly. As a result of the very strong winds they could not fly and it became the third day in row that they were grounded in Cumberland County.

Cumberland County in Southeastern Illinois is a relatively small county occupied by approximately 11,000 people. It was named for the Cumberland Road, aka the National Road, that passes through it. The county seat is Toledo, a tiny village of somewhat more than on thousand inhabitants living on only 0.8 square miles of land. There are only four communities in the county, plus part of two more that are mostly in adjoining counties. It's a perfect spot for a remote Whooper stopover.

Unfortunately it has just been reported that bird 217 who was mate of bird 211 is dead. The pair have a child which is bird W601. W601 was the first whooping crane to be hatched in the wild in the US in more than a century. The threesome were dubbed the first family. In a report received yesterday it was advised that the mortality was discovered on Tuesday during a routine aerial flight.The male was spotted but bird 217 was not visible. Her transmitter signal was tracked to a location a few miles away where her carcass was found. It was noted that the recovery site was not the mortality site. The carcass has gone for necropsy to the National Wildlife Heath Center in Madison, WI.

Batteries

2009-11-24T11:19:00.000+02:00

As most of you have seen WE have been having major problems with our batteries once again. This seems to happen every few months and it is a complete frustration in our lives as I am sure that it is for you as well. In order to get the video signal from the game drive vehicle back to the Final Control WE encode the video then modulate that data and finally amplify and transmit that modulated signal. This requires three large energy intensive systems that all run on 220 volt AC current, which is supplied by an inverter. The inverter is powered by batteries which are twice as big as a car battery. The video/audio transmission equipment on the game drive vehicle is very power hungry and so WE use 8 of these batteries mounted behind the ranger's seat.

This whole battery problem is caused by a relatively difficult issue to resolve, and that is the fact that WE destroy our batteries because we over discharge them and, we don't charge them enough before we use them again, which reduces their capacity fast. This is a known problem which is hard to fix because our schedule is what it is and the gaps of time between drives are too short.

This basically means that every few months WE have to replace a whole set of batteries which is expensive. However, Peter Braat is working on a method of charging which will hopefully keep the next set for a year without them being destroyed.

WE have bought a new set and will be picking them up from Nelspruit in the next few days. Then WE will be back to proper three hour drives and night drives as well. Thank you for being so patient and understanding about this problem and rest assured in the knowledge that WE are doing everything within our power to get back to normal as soon as possible.

The WE family.

2009-11-23T16:55:00.000+02:00

WEll done to Valorie Berry for putting together this amazing video. It is a real tear jerker, I had goose bumps from the word go. Also a big thanks to all of our wonderful viewers for helping with this. It means so much to us and is a beautiful piece of video showing WildEarth as one big family. This will go down in history in our archives. Once again thanks for all of your support and love of animals - it truly is in your nature!

WElcome to Whoo.

2009-11-19T12:06:00.000+02:00

Last week Marc rescued an small scops owl and named it Whoo. Whoo has become a very WElcomed new member of our team and WE are happy that Marc is now raising it. Marc is not sure whether it is male or female but he reckons that it is about 2 weeks old based on the appearance of its 'ears' which reportedly appear at 12 days. Its ears, as can be seen in the photo have been there for 2 days or so. Marc expects that it will be fully fledged at 3 and a 1/2 to 4 weeks. With the help of Jess and Lara, he is collecting any arthropods that he can find; beetles, winged termites, moths and crickets. The last few days have been cold and wet and there has been a dearth of insects, so he has been giving it some beef mince or beef pieces depending on what is being cooked. He needs to feed it some vertebrates like lizards or geckos but he says that that is very hard for him to do.

Marc does know what age he will keep it until, it may fly when it is fledged and disappear or it may stick around if it has imprinted on Marc. This is a very unpredictable part of the equation. He keeps it in a small box which is about 20 x 25 x 20cm and lined with some kapok like nesting material. It doesn't resemble a nest of the species but resembles the dark hole of a natural nest in a hole in a tree. As Marc is not an adult owl with the ability to teach it of the dangers, it is going to be vulnerable to other predators, both avian ( raptors) mammal ( genets, wildcat, monkeys, baboons ) and reptiles (snakes and maybe white throated monitors).

It poses no danger to Marc or anyone when it gets older. It is almost full size already and its small size means that Marc does not even have to wear a glove when handling it as the talons are not that strong.

Ultimately Marc would like it to function like a wild Scops Owl and still be able to come to him but that is pure fantasy at this stage. At best he hopes that it returns to the wild and forgets about humans and finds a mate and goes on as a wild owl. They are a monogamous species and although quite numerous, they are very special little birds and Marc has certainly lost his heart to this one.

News from Pix Controller

2009-11-18T08:57:00.001+02:00

Pix Controller have several interesting items to report this week:

There is a flock of turkey that seem to be coming into the main camera almost every day now. They have a flock of hens (female birds) that is about 10 birds total. Within this flock is a hen with a beard. This is very unusual since only the male birds have beards. The “beard” of a turkey hangs down from the middle of the turkey’s chest and looks like a horse tail. Scientists call the “hairs” of the beard “bristles” or “mesofiloplumes” (“MEZ-uh-FILL-uh-ploomz”) — stiff, feather-like structures.

They were able to capture some pretty good footage of the hen with the beard. She's been seen since last year but they didn't have the PTZ camera or the broadcasts provided by WildEarth to record the activity like they can now. (see attached photo)

Related Hotspot:

Bearded Hen

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F11%2F12%2F2009-11-12-08-49_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=38322&start=0

The White Tailed Deer remote motion-activated scrape camera has seen some action. They have broadcast several younger bucks working the scrap site over and we have one great recorded hotspot of a very mature 8-point whitetail buck following a doe in the early morning hours. Hopefully they will continue to see action on this remote camera as the mating season winds down at the end of this month.

Related Hotspots:

Buck on scrape camera

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01;jsessionid=297A86F911CB0455AB91509DB7AF5CFE.node3?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F11%2F17%2F2009-11-17-08-10_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=39445&start=540

Button buck works over scrape

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F11%2F09%2F2009-11-09-22-15_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=37871&start=282

Doe looking at scrape

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F11%2F08%2F2009-11-08-07-00_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=37506&start=5

Big 8-point buck following doe

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F11%2F07%2F2009-11-07-08-50_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=37446&start=482

They now have their remote motion-activated carcass camera up and running. They get deer carcasses from their local game commission. These are road killed deer and they put them to good use. They started this camera last year and it was very successful at bringing in predators such as fox and coyotes, and of course many raccoons. They also had a lot of action during the day from hawks and turkey vultures. They plan to run the remote carcass camera site until spring time when it starts warming up again.

Related Hotspots:

Raccoons on carcass camera

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F11%2F17%2F2009-11-17-03-50_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=39437&start=546

Red Fox on carcass camera

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F11%2F14%2F2009-11-14-23-00_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=38977&start=120

Opossum on carcass camera

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F11%2F13%2F2009-11-13-00-29_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=38485&start=44

New Cams on Wildearth

2009-11-13T12:45:00.000+02:00

David Hancock and the Hancock Wildlife Foundation Eagle Cams.

David Hancock from the Hancock Wildlife Foundation is streaming two new cameras onto WE and there are more to come. David is eagle man and true to style these are both eagle related. The first is called Chehalis Platform Cam. This is a camera that has been placed on a platform on the Chehalis Flats.

The Chehalis Flats are at the end of the Chehalis River that comes from the northwest in British Columbia. This river and the Harrison River contain some of the richest salmon spawning shallows in the world. All five salmon thrive here along with steelhead and rainbow trout. Spawning season is happening right now and thousands of salmon carcasses are being washed down the river system to feed the eagles. David Hancock has set up platforms along the estuary to allow you to watch the eagles and other wildlife feeding on the spawning salmon. In the past more than 1000 eagles have been seen in this area on a single day so these cameras promise to be phenomenal.

In addition to the estuary cameras, they have an underwater camera (seen as Chehalis trout cam on WildEarth) in the spawning channel at the entrance to the Chehalis fish hatchery. This gives spectacular live views of these fish under the water.

During the Eagle Festival (November 20^th,21^st) David will hopefully be featuring some video taken by hand-held cameras in and around the Tapedira area to the West of the Estuary. Included in these they are hoping to have interviews with and commentaries by local naturalists and conservationists.

To find out more about this project and more go to www.hancockwildlife.org

David continues to broadcast from OWL cam one and two and Sidney cam one and two. Both of these have been incredible and WE were very honoured to get them on our site at the beginning of this year. Recently eagles have been seen at the nests again preparing for the next season, so watch this space.

Doug Carrick's Hornby Island Eagle Cam

Doug Carrick’s Hornby Island Eagle Cam is back for the 2009-2010 season. This very special pair of bald eagles are already back in the nest and yesterday they were seen moving sticks and twigs around to make the nest habitable again. The nest was discovered in 2006 and has been broadcasting ever since. This glimpse into the lives of a pair of bald eagles is amazing and WE are honoured to have it on our site. For more info on these eagles go to www.hornbyeagles.com

Pot Plant Owl

Alan and Tracey woke up one morning in Johannesburg, South Africa and looked out onto their balcony to find an owl staring back at them from a pot plant just outside their bedroom window. It was a spotted eagle owl and it remained there the whole day. As night came this magnificent bird of prey flew off into the darkness. The next day she was back and has remained there ever since. On August 21st 2009 she laid the first of three eggs in the pot plant. The male bird comes in regularly to help raise the chicks and Alan and Tracy share their living space with these wonderful birds. Now we have a camera watching these birds live as they go about their daily business. It offers insight into their feeding patterns both as tiny chicks and as mature adults. You can watch the special bond she has with these chicks and watch this incredible piece of nature unfold. To find out more about the story log on to www.potplantowl.co.za.

A Change of Guard

2009-11-09T11:47:00.001+02:00

Above is a picture of Allimo Mahanuke. She is a Shangaan lady from the village of Dixie and will be stepping in for Siphiwe whilst she is on maternity leave. Allimo is married to Pete Marimane who is a well known guide in the area and in fact has guided at Djuma a few years a go. Together they have two children, both little girls. One is called Trudy and is four years old and the other is Tildah who is only eight months. Allimo has bought them in to the WildEarth camp and much to the delight of our crew Trudy often walks around with Tildah tied with a towel on her back - in the true African way.

Allimo is perfect for the job of WildEarth Zoomie as she has a diploma in computing and also loves animals. WE are sure that she will be as calm as Siphiwe when the computers go down and there is panic all around. Good luck Allimo and WElcome to the team.

Siphiwe is just about ready to pop and is very tired these days. Her last day will be Saturday 14th November and WE wish her all the best with the birth of her third child. Siphiwe will join us again next year around March time. Below is a picture of her looking beautiful and glowing.

News from Operation Migration

2009-11-05T14:01:00.000+02:00

As of this morning Operation Migration are on Day 21 of the southward migration and they have already covered 94.4 airmiles. Only 1190.6 miles to go! It really is a mission.

They are planning to do another leg today. If they manage it weather wise (which looks really possible) they'll be ahead of last year by 3 days.Today's leg will put the team in Illinois, and just 55 miles shy of a milestone of 10,000 miles. That's 10,000 miles guiding Whooping Cranes South to their new winter terminus. What an amazing achievement.

After a rocky start when the birds seemed reluctant to follow the trikes, the last two flights have seen all 20 young Whooping cranes eagerly following, and the last migration leg had all of them lined up beautifully behind one ultralight.

As most of you have probably seen the broadcast is intermittent on www.wildearth.tv. This is because they are not broadcasting when the trike is not in the air. However, the weather has improved greatly and the flights are becoming more frequent so keep your eyes on this channel as when it does pop up it is spectacular.

News from Pennsylvania

2009-11-02T13:17:00.001+02:00

As you probably know by now Pix Controller have installed a 3rd motion-activated remote camera which is currently setup over an active whitetail scrape. A whitetail scrape is an area a whitetail buck will create by scraping a patch of ground under a small tree usually in a funnel area where other bucks will see it. These act as a way bucks will communicate to each other during the mating season or the rut as it is known. A buck will scent the area by licking the branches above the scrape and urinate in the scrape. Many different bucks will typically visit a scrape site which is a great opportunity to video mature bucks.

The camera they have setup over an active scrape has not produced much to date other that this one hotspot:

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01/2009/10/19/2009-10-19-18-10_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=32852&start=515

However, not too far from this site they did capture this action on one of our motion-activated DVR systems this past week:

http://www.youtube.com/pixcontroller#p/a/u/0/XwGhbQI6Auo

Pix Controller believe this is the first time an active scrape has been broadcast over the Internet LIVE. They have the ability to move this 3rd remote camera to another scrape site in hopes to see some better action before this phase of the mating season ends in about 3 weeks.

Another rather interesting find on their camera was two sightings of a whitetail doe with deformed hooves.Her hooves are unusually long which is caused by too much protein in her diet. Bill says that he has never seen this before, but has seen photos of this on the Internet. She has made two appearances to the main camera. They were able to capture some great footage and zoom the camera in for a better look at her hooves. (see attached photo)

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01/2009/10/25/2009-10-25-23-06_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=34355&start=1

Lastly, they have viewed some interesting groundhog behavior on the main camera. They witnessed groundhogs feeding at night last year, but when they were able to capture a hotspot and show a local wildlife expert he was amazed to see this. Groundhogs are not known to be nocturnal since they do not have eyes which can see in the dark very well. However, what we are seeing appears to be groundhogs feeding as much as they can before hibernation. Here is one of the video clips captured:

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01/2009/10/11/2009-10-11-22-40_pix-wpa-01.flv&bspId=30950&start=307

They also captured a couple clips of groundhog fighting over food area. This appears to be several groundhogs defending their territory.

Operation Migration - The Dreaded Weather

2009-10-26T11:50:00.001+02:00

Everything was going so well. There was an extended period of perfect flying conditions and everything seemed to be running smoothly. Once the three groups of birds have learned to fly they are then brought together to make one flock. Once together they must organise themselves into a hierarchy before they can carry on. This entails a lot of pecking and bullying but finally each bird finds its place and the flock is ready. However this year, the heavens opened during the mixing of the last cohort. They need a lot of good weather and flight practicing before there is unity in the air and this year they have not flown for what seems like weeks due to rain and heavy winds.

The bad weather has forced the team to look at a variety of difficult decisions. The birds are fast becoming sedentary and reluctant to leave the pen. When they go out to practice the winds are so strong that the aircraft cannot slow down to wait for the bird and often birds turn back for the pen. They just want the comfort of the wet pen with lots of food. The team now have to work out whether they should carry on this negative training in bad weather or risk crating them to the first stop over. Crating can be dangerous for the birds and will also make them wary of the men dressed in white who pack them into the crates. After avidly watching the forecast and seeing no break in this terrible weather they decided to box eight of the birds and send them to the refuge.

The next question is whether to box the birds that they think will turn back and therefore disrupt the flock and box them to stopover two? This will at least ensure that the ones who are likely to make it will have the best chances and they can start to rebuild the flock. However, as mentioned crating is dangerous and is it worth doing damage to the birds who are already reluctant to follow the aircraft?

It is such a disappointing start to a very long and challenging journey. However, the bad weather can't last forever and WE are rooting for their success. Keep watching www.wildearth.tv for their broadcasts. They are few and far between at the moment which is why they do not show up on the portal. However, the camera is on the trike and when they are in the air the shots are fantastic.

Update on the Pix Controller Wildlife Webcam

2009-10-19T08:39:00.001+02:00

The PixController wildlife webcam recently has been updated with Hotspots. This has been a great addition to the camera as it allows people to view videos clips of action they missed during the day. This coupled with the addition of an upgraded and better PTZ camera they've been able to capture some amazing fall action in Western Pennsylvania. Some of the video clips captured include several nice whitetail bucks and does as well as groundhogs, mourning doves, various song birds, and raccoons. With the new PTZ camera they are able to zoom in and follow the animals around like you have seen on the African cameras.

Here is a red fox licking the salt lick.

http://www.wildearth.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F10%2F04%2F2009-10-04-08-00_pix-wpa-01.flv&start=560

Here is a red fox peeing on the salt block at night.

http://www.zaplive.tv/web/pix-wpa-01?streamId=pix-wpa-01%2F2009%2F10%2F05%2F2009-10-05-19-40_pix-wpa-01.flv&start=306

Some of the more interesting clips include two small whitetail bucks sparring and one 2 1/2 year old whitetail buck chasing doe around in the morning. These are signs of the whitetail mating season which is just getting underway. Another interesting clip captured was a groundhog feeding at night, which they typically do not do. Groundhogs will only feed at night as winter approaches in order to prepare for hibernation. Last year was the first time they saw this behavior since groundhog have very small eyes which are not meant for nocturnal use. The interesting thing about this video clip was watching the groundhog feed with the raccoons. There was a little spat between the two species and the groundhog puffed himself up and stood his ground against this predator.

They also are pleased to announce the addition of yet another remote motion-activated camera which will come on-line very soon. This is in addition to the remote motion-activated carcass camera due to come on-line in about a month. This next remote camera will be placed on an active whitetail scraping site, which is used during the rut or mating season. Scraping sites are typically found under small trees and are 2' to 4' in diameter which a whitetail buck will create during this time period. Bill Powers from Pix Controller has been filming scraping sites for about 8 years now with their motion-activated video systems. What they've seen is that much of what has been written about scraping sites does not follow with what they have captured on video. These sites present a wonderful opportunity to see some very mature whitetail bucks which typically are very elusive throughout the year. Being able to broadcast this action live over the Internet will be a first of it's kind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-duGuq-fA0

Whooping Crane Migration

2009-10-14T13:44:00.000+02:00

There are 21 cranes in the class of 2009 and group dynamics have been very interesting. The pecking order on the ground is often very different than in the air with the roles of dominance swapping around. 924 has been the biggest bully of the group this year and 925 the meekest and most timid. This has been the largest group that they have ever attempted to migrate in nine years of migrations.

The migration itself is an incredibly hard mission to make. It is 1285 miles and covers seven states of America. They will be using four ultralight aircraft each weighing 365 pounds. There will be five pilots and altogether fourteen people in the migration team from the US and Canada. It is important to note that they are at the mercy of mother nature, they need ideal conditions to fly. There needs to be moderate wind, no rain and ideally cold air. Birds fly much better in cooler air. They will use the network of as many as 26 stop overs pre -established along the migration route. This year Operation Migration will log their 10000th air mile. WE and Operation Migration invite you to give a WHOOP and help us celebrate this incredible achievement. http://www.operationmigration.org/GAWlandingpage.html

Also for the first time ever this year there will be a camera on the aircraft. This will bring views never before been seen of these beautiful birds in flight as they guide them to their new winter home and survival of the species. CraneCam will provide LIVE views from the ground and you can watch it on www.wildearth.tv.

The migration will take off very soon so keep your eyes on the Operation Migration Channel so that you can join them.

The circle of life.

2009-10-07T00:04:00.000+02:00

Perhaps the deepest, greatest part of life is the celebration of birth and, hopefully, the celebration of a full life lived. The celebration of death. It is sad and perhaps even something we as humans fear, but there is a peacefulness in death, found surely by the one who's life it was.
It is with this feeling and understanding, that I can write these words. It brings me peace to say that this elephant cow, this matriarch, mother, and grand mother, passed away at a ripe old age, surrounded by all those close to her. Her herd would have known her their whole lives, as she would have known them, just as she would have known her own mother and family that went before her.
The medical details are not important, the fact that she lived a full life, a rich life and died of old age, is. That experience; to have shared life, and in the end, death, is an important one for every elephant in her herd; just as it was for her over the years. It is how we learn and share the circle of our lives.
From the tracks the morning she was found, it was clear that the herd had been around her as and after she passed away. From what I have seen over the years in the bush, I think humans are perhaps the only mammals that sometimes fear death. I dare say, even to the point of keeping us from living sometimes. In the wild I have seen many battles to live, and always animals will fight and hold on to life with a tenacity and instinct we can well appreciate, but never have I perceived fear of death in wild, free animals.
Were it not for those around us, to observe, "us" would not even exist. In the end, it is those we share our lives with, share experiences and moments with, that give meaning to life, and every moment we can do so enriches that experience. Every moment.
Written by Pieter Pretorius

(Note: WE would like to thank Djuma Game Reserve, the Sabi Sands and Jurie and Pippa Moolman for fighting so hard for the rights of wild animals to be wild, and always allowing us to share this with you. Also, WE would like to thank Chitwa Chitwa and Charl Brink for giving us the opportunity to visit this cow on their land. Finally, WE would like to thank you. Because it is your wisdom, willingness to learn and trust in those of us that value and protect the rights of wild animals to live lives as unaffected by humans as possible, that makes it all possible. She has gone, but her life lives on. Her calf will grow, and one day she may be the matriach. The circle of life is perfect. WE are happy it happened like this.)

Marc's Race

2009-10-01T11:38:00.001+02:00

Marc got out there and worked very hard, but unfortunately he was not able to catch up with Pieter's score. He did come second, and I guess he can't win every race. :)

Well done Marc for getting 45 positively identified animals with a spine!

15h35 Red-billed Buffalo-weaver

15h35 Brubru

15h35 Yellow-billed Hornbill

15h35 Southern Black Tit

15h39 Southern Black Flycatcher

15h40 Red-headed Weaver

15h40 Fork-tailed Drongo

15h43 White-crested Helmet-shrike

15h47 Impala

15h47 Red-billed Oxpecker

15h50 Human Being

15h52 Lilac-breasted Roller

16h02 Little Banded Goshawk

16h05 Black-headed Oriole

16h08 Grey Heron

16h09 Magpie Shrike

16h12 Grey Duiker

16h16 Waterbuck

16h16 Blue Wildebeest

16h17 Emerald-spotted Wood-dove

16h22 Burchell's Zebra

16h25 Hippopotamus

16h27 Cape Turtle-dove

16h28 Cape Glossy Starling

16h31 Red-billed Hornbill

16h32 White-browed Scrub-robin

16h32 Crested Francolin

16h42 Tree Squirrel

16h44 Nyala

16h49 Vervet Monkey

16h50 Wattled Starling

16h50 Grey Go-away-bird

16h53 Blacksmith Lapwing

16h58 Wahlberg's Eagle

17h07 Barred Owlet

17h10 Egyptian Goose

17h10 Cape Buffalo

17h29 Hadeda Ibis

17h31 Burchell's Starling

17h33 Helmeted Guineafowl

17h34 Chacma Baboon

17h35 Mozambique Tilapia

17h55 Arrow-marked Babbler

18h28 Fiery-necked Nightjar

18h30 Steenbok

Drive times

2009-10-01T11:12:00.000+02:00

Summer is well and truly here and so the sun is rising earlier and setting later.This is when WE change our drive times. The morning drive will go our half an hour earlier at 05h30CAT (03h30GMT, 23h30 EST, 20h30PST) and the afternoon drive will also leave half an hour later at 16h00CAT (14h00GMT, 10h00EST, 07h00PST). As a result of this the night safari will also have to leave half an hour later at 19h30CAT (17h30GMT, 13h30EST, 10h30PST). Just to remind you the night drives only go out on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. From now on the Wednesday night Walala Wasala and the Friday and Sunday night Fire Side Chats will be broadcast at 19h15CAT (17h15GMT, 13h15EST, 10h15PST).
Rexon has gone on a well deserved break for two weeks and therefore Walala Wasala will be off for this time. Herman is back in a few days and Peter Braat will be leaving us for a break next week.

Pieter's Race

2009-09-27T23:42:00.000+02:00

Pieter had a great race this afternoon. 51 animals (all with spines) all identified correctly and within a short while of the race ending. (Looks like you are all getting quite good at this). So that puts Pieter in the lead, Rexon second and patrick in third. Just Marc to go now, and he has quite a number to beat.
Here are Pieter's results, along with a Hotspot (used to be called 'seekpoints') for each sighting. A big thank you to Kathy and Sharon for making, collating, checking and sharing all the Hotspots. Enjoy ...

15h32 Human Being

15h34 Greater Kudu

15h34 Arrow-marked Babbler

15h35 Waterbuck

15h36 Cape Turtle-Dove

15h36 Emerald-spotted Wood-dove

15h38 Cape Buffalo

15h38 Red-billed Oxpecker

15h39 Impala

15h40 Red-billed Hornbill

15h42 Helmeted Guineafowl

15h47 Domestic Dog

15h50 Laughing Dove

15h54 Lilac-breasted Roller

16h03 Egyptian Goose

16h04 Nyala

16h06 Cape Glossy Starling

16h08 Blacksmith Lapwing

16h08 Water Thick-knee

16h09 Grey Go-away-bird

16h15 Hippopotamus

16h15 Helmeted Terrapin

16h17 Crested Francolin

16h23 Little Bee-eater

16h24 White-browed Scrub-robin

16h31 Bateleur

16h40 Fork-tailed Drongo

16h42 Yellow-fronted Canary

16h46 Long-billed Crombec

16h49 Rattling Cisticola

16h52 Burchell's Zebra

16h56 Malachite Kingfisher

16h57 Three-banded Plover

17h15 Burchell's Starling

17h23 African Elephant

17h24 Bennett's Woodpecker

17h33 Rock Monitor

17h35 African Hawk-Eagle

17h42 Grey Heron

17h42 Green-backed Heron

17h43 Hadeda Ibis

17h47 Tree Squirrel

17h50 Dwarf Mongoose

17h51 Green Wood-hoopoe

17h56 Red-billed Buffalo-weaver

18h02 Wahlberg's Eagle

18h05 Hamerkop

18h07 Hyaena

18h14 Fiery-necked Nightjar

18h22 Lesser Bush-baby

18h25 Scrub hare

Patrick's Race

2009-09-27T23:02:00.000+02:00

Patrick was the second ranger to run the race. He did very well, in spite of a delay for rain. All his animals (with spines of course) were identified almost straight away and he ended up with 39 positively identified animals. This puts him slightly behind Rexon. Here are his results ...

15h33 Human Being

15h33 Cape Turtle-Dove

15h35 Burchell's Starling

15h38 Dwarf Mongoose

15h39 Southern Yellow-billed hornbill

15h42 Elephant

15h44 Waterbuck

15h53 Steenbok

16h16 Cape Buffalo

16h21 Hippopotamus

16h22 Fork-tailed Drongo

16h23 Lilac-breasted Roller

16h26 Blue Wildebeest

16h29 Egyptian Goose

16h31 Burchell's Zebra

16h36 Red-billed Hornbill

16h38 Swainson's Francolin

16h40 Red-crested Korhaan

16h42 Emerald-spotted Wood-dove

16h45 Tree Squirrel

16h52 Cape Glossy Starling

16h54 Three-banded Plover

17h04 Grey Go-away-bird

17h06 Rattling Cisticola

17h07 Crested Francolin

17h09 White Rhinoceros

17h15 Brown-hooded Kingfisher

17h19 Impala

17h26 Grey Duiker

17h33 Red-billed Buffalo-weaver

17h34 Red-billed Oxpecker

17h40 Helmeted Guineafowl

17h49 Flap-necked Chameleon

17h58 Bateleur

17h59 Arrow-marked Babbler

18h15 Domestic Dog

18h22 Water Thick-knee

18h25 Scrub Hare

18h26 Lesser Bushbaby