A Window To Nature

“A family drove here from Ohio because they saw the eagle cam on our Web site and watched the eagles hatch,” said designer Lisa Mayo who created the site www.friendsofblackwater.org five years ago as a project for a design class at the University of Maryland.

The eagle cam at Blackwater Wildlife Refuge draws national and international traffic to the site and the Refuge. Visitors come from all over the world for the annual Eagle Festival in March. "We still get emails from a woman in Amsterdam who came here last year on vacation. Now she sends us cam shots for our Eagle blog."

Lisa Mayo, who also designed the Web site for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, still volunteers to maintain the Web site for the Friends of Blackwater, a group of four hundred members devoted to preserving the Refuge. It has been an exciting ride.

THE CHALLENGE OF SUCCESS

The success of the Web site created unsuspected technical challenges that had to be overcome quickly. “Originally when we put up the eagle cam, we had a donated ISP,” Lisa said. “When the second eagle hatched, our server crashed because of the hits to our site. All the other customers of the donated site complained because they could not get on line.”

After the server crashed, the Friends of Blackwater lost their free ISP. Working fast, they were up on another site in 14 hours. Though they had to pay for this one, they got a good rate and now have their own high-usage server.

That’s important to the success of the site. Web site hits are growing. Raptor cams, the name for the cameras aimed at the eagle and osprey nests at Blackwater, are used in other parks and refuges all over the world. The cameras create site traffic and viewer participation.

Before the eagle cam went up in 2001, the Friends of Blackwater did one-half a gigabyte a month. After the eagles hatched, the traffic exploded. This year, the Refuge broke their record with 110 gigabytes a month of traffic since March 26, 2006.

Lisa had originally planned to only have one raptor cam, but with the success of the eagle cam, she worked with other volunteers to add an osprey cam to the Web site. Unlike the eagle cam, which is located in a secret area, the osprey cam is on a clearly visible platform.

The camera is powered by batteries. The feed goes to the server and then to the Web site. A donation box, located next to the video screen in the information center, encourages visitors to donate to the camera’s upkeep.

THE PUBLIC WANTS MORE

Success demanded other content changes. Lisa developed the blogs to communicate with the cam watchers who sent her detailed emails about what topics they want to learn about. Lisa’s educational blogs answer questions about the hatching process, eagle crop and food storage, and the relation of birth order to the sex of the newborn eagle.

Lisa said a viewer in California wrote that she feels better if she keeps the eagle cam open all day on her "computer desktop." Because she works inside for long hours, the Web site is her "window to nature."

To keep viewer participation growing, the site added a photo gallery and interactive quizzes and puzzles.

With these additions, the national and the international audience has increased. The osprey cam gets the most hits from Great Britain where the osprey is returning to its traditional nesting grounds. The osprey was made nearly extinct by poachers stealing the colorful eggs. Most osprey nests in Great Britain are now guarded 24 hours a day by volunteers.

In the future, Lisa plans to ad a virtual driving tour to the Web site and a "pay- pal" donation button on the Web site so people can donate on line. "Pay-pal" takes international currency.

THREATENED PARADISE

There is a dark side to this good news of the Web site's success: Is it possible that a refuge that people all over the world have come to love and support could disappear?

Many conservationists believe that the Refuge could be destroyed over time if the proposed housing development in nearby Cambridge, Md., pollutes the water of the Little Blackwater Creek, the tributary to the Big Blackwater that feeds the Refuge.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has joined with local farmers in a suit to stop development.

The Friends of Blackwater have been criticized for not taking a stance on their site against the development. With the volunteer board in disagreement, the site remains neutral on the development which will build 3200 townhouses ten miles from the Refuge.

The Friends do not use their Web site for advocacy, but the Web site attracted an attorney, who specializes in environmental causes, to volunteer to help other organizations that have joined together to fight the development.

While the future of the Blackwater Refuge is unknown, Lisa concentrates on maintaining the cameras and telling the story of this special place. She can’t disappoint her viewers all around the world. “We got an email this week from a science teacher in China,” she said, “Telling us that her students got up in the middle of the night to watch our eagles hatch.”