44 degrees F Cloudy Wind NW 4 mph
Sunrise 5:44 am CDT Sunset 8:35 pm CDT
Still no loons. Disappointingly.
With each passing day, it seems to confirm that we will not have loons nesting here on the LoonCam this year.
However, I think I do have a little bit of good news for you.
I just found out from Minnesota Bound that they are planning on airing a segment on the LoonCam this next week. I was not aware of that before now.
Because of that, they have asked if we can leave the nest out and the LoonCam on for a few more days.
And of course I immediately agreed with them.
So be sure you try to catch that episode of Minnesota Bound either live on tv locally or on their website.
They have been helpful and so great to work with for so many years. There is real question if the LoonCam every would have happened without their help.
Early on in the history of this nest, Minnesota Bound wanted to know if they could do a television story about the nest.
Little did any of us know what would become of that.
As part of our preparation for that story, I talked to them about a dream that I had.- that was to actually put a camera on the nest.
We didn't know if we could do it. We didn't know if it would work.
But we tried anyway.
There were so many challenges to doing a live camera out in a lake.
And miraculously, not only did it work, it worked wonderfully well. Not to say that there were not a lot of technical challenges to be worked out so many years ago. But we got it to work.
Not only did it work, we were able to see things that no one had ever seen before with loons.
Including the first video taping of a loon actually laying an egg. As far as we know, that had never been captured on film or video before.
After the camera has worked so well, the next year I asked Minnesota Bound if they would be willing to work with me on putting it on the web so that people could see what I had been watching on my television in my living room.
As we met and discussed what would be necessary to make it happen, I asked the President of the company that was going to be doing the web hosting and the technical end of things, "What if this really takes off? Will you be able to handle all the traffic?"
He literally laughed and said, "Larry, we handle the websites for 5 Fortune 500 companies. We have HUGE server farms in several different places around the country. There is NO WAY that we would ever come close to reaching their capacity! We can handle anything that this will throw at us."
Part of the concern was that we were hoping to broadcast live full-motion video. Almost no one was doing that at the time. They were doing 30 second refreshes or 10 second, where ONE picture was sent every 30 seconds.
Hardly anyone back then was doing full motion because of the huge bandwidth costs.
Well, suffice it to say that we crashed the network several times with the number of people who were watching the LoonCam around the world.
When I talked to him after the first couple crashes, he said, "No one told me or knew that it was going to be this popular!"
So we have come a long way in these last 10 years or more!
Eagle cams have almost become a dime a dozen. But for many years the LoonCam was the only live webcam on the nest of a loon.
Thank you to so many of you who have been faithful viewers for all these years!
SO the good news today is that we will leave the LoonCam on for a few more days, at least into next week.
Enjoy the view.
And hopefully we will at least get a glimpse or two of our loons.
Last night I did get some other good news. The other pair of loons on the lake has apparently started nesting. That is very good news! When I went to look a couple weeks ago, there was no sign that they were nesting at that time.
But now someone has sighted them on the nest.
I will try to keep you updated about what is happening.
Thank you for being such a wonderful community of Loon Lovers!
Questions or comments? Email us at LoonCam at yahoo dot com. Because of the volume of email I will not be able to respond personally to each email. But I will eventually read every one and for recurring questions I will try to answer them here in this blog.
Copyright 2016 Larry R Backlund