Centennial, Colorado, in the Denver-metro area.
| NO LIVE
FLICKER
CAM AT THIS TIME. Enjoy the Archives! |
| The FLICKER CAM Nesting Box is on the side of
a house in Centennial, Colorado, in the Denver-metro area. |
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| "Woodpeckers are
classified as migratory nongame birds and are protected by the Federal
Migratory Bird Treaty Act. A
federal permit is
required before any lethal control methods are employed. Penalties and
fines are assessed to violators." --CSU
Cooperative
Extension
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Conservation Status Widespread and common, but populations declining. --Cornell Lab
of Ornithology
Please read the article "Woodpecker
Woes" if you have a flicker problem.
Remember, by law you must exhaust all non-leathal means AND obtain a
permit to kill these birds as a means of control! |
| FLICKER CAM - SPRING 2007 |
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| May
25,
2007. Once the work on the neighbor's house was complete,
the flickers abandoned our box and returned to the willow tree. Since
there are no birds in our box, we have decided not to connect the
cameras this year. |
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April
28,
2007. A flicker was in the box today for the first
time, excavating so much litter that it seemed to be snowing! I wasn't
able to get close enough w/out scaring it off to get a very good
picture, but there does seem to be a pair of flickers showing interest.
The neighbors are having new siding installed, and we wonder if all the
activity has caused the willow flickers to check out "new digs." They
are chosen the non-starling resistant box in the locust tree, which
faces north-east. |
 Two flicker boxes - Russian Olive- lower left corner Locust (w/bird) Upper right corner |
March
2007. After painting the house, we
took the flicker box that had been on house and mounted it and a
starling resistant box in two of our big trees--a locust and a Russain
Olive. The flickers had seemed
to choose the neighbor's huge, punky willow for thier nest, and their
territory included our two boxes, whch had see no activity from either
starlings or flickers this spring. Between the harsh winter weather
& lack of activity, we didn't hook up the carmeras. |
| SUET FEEDER CAM - Winter 2006-2007 |
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| March
6,
2007. We have mounted two flicker houses in our
trees--one in a locust, and the other in a Russian olive. One is a
regular box, and one is "starling resistant. " Since we don't have the
cameras up yet, it's difficult to say if there has been any bird
interest. No shavings have been excavated, but today there were three
flickers in the locust tree calling and interacting with one another. |
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 Flicker caught in flight gives a glimpse of the red under its wings. |
January 31, 2007. With continued cold
weather
and snow, the suet feeder has really caught on with the flickers! Today
we
saw six or seven flickers again, simultaneously. We also saw
about
4-6 western blue birds on the house today, drinking from the trickling
downspouts
near the upstairs bedrooms. We have never seen blue birds around the
house
before. |
Female flicker waits her turn at the suet as a starling gobbles it down. The look on her face says it all!  Now it's the starling's turn to wait! |
January 19, 2007. Observed at least six
flickers around the suet simultaneously at about 1:00-1:30p.m.. They
were directly competing with a flock of starlings for the suet. The
flickers were mostly females, but a red-mustached male and the
black-mustached male were among the group. Finally observed the black
mustached male in flight and confirmed he has red underwings and
therefore must be a hybrid. The acrobatics between the flickers
themselves and between the flickers and starlings as they jockeyed for
the best position where quite impressive! The black-mustached male
seems to be the most assertive, both with his own kind and with
starling interlopers. The flickers were also on the ground picking up
seeds from our songbird
feeder. Temperatures are in the 30's today after a week of more frigid
weather,
and the birds seem to be enjoying the balmy temperatures. It's so
great to see so many flickers at once time after last year's scarcity
of
them. The first red-mustached male flicker we've seen all winter. Competition from starlings was fierce today.  While the flicker and starling clans were off battling, a downy woodpecker nipped in for a bite. A chickadee appeared and shared the feeder for a moment, but our camera didn't catch its image so you'll have to take my word for it. |
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January 15, 2007. The black
mustached flicker was back! We think it may be a hybrid because it
doesn't appear to have the red chevron on the back of the neck that
yellow shafted flickers have. We haven't seen him fly, so we don't know
if he is yellow or red shafted.  |
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January 9th, 2007. Is this a trick of the
light, or is this a yellow-shafted flicker at our suet? The black
mustache is characteristic of the yellow-shafted flicker, usually found
in the Eastern U.S. |
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December 31, 2006. Our camera is a little
blurry from the two recent blizzards, but we can still tell the female
flicker is enjoying the suet! |
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December 16, 2006. The female flicker is
becoming a regular at the suet! So is the downy woodpecker. |
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December 12, 2006. Our daughter's
concoction of peanut butter, bread crumbs, and bird seed attracted alot
of attention, and proof that Flickers still exist in Colorado! (we were
beginning to wonder). Our friend the Downy enjoyed the treat as well.  |
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December 6, 2006. A downy woodpecker
visits the feeder in between squirrel visits. |
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November 13, 2006 After weeks of
nothing but squirrels cleaning out all the suet, we finally had a
flicker visit today! |
| Flicker Cam
provides views of a privately maintained bird box in Centennial,
Colorado. Web design by Andrea Loughry. Technical support by Joe Loughry. Email us |
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ABOUT OUR SETUP
The
bird house is monitored continuously by two video cameras; a color
camera is mounted outside the box; inside is a monochrome camera with
infrared (IR) LED illumination. Both cameras were purchased from http://www.allelectronics.com
and have proved to be reliable even when mounted outside without
weatherproofing in Colorado. The composite video signal from each
camera is digitized by a Hauppauge WinTV-GO PCI video digitizer board
in a 300 MHz eMachines PC running FreeBSD. The computer was
rescued from a trash bin and currently handles e-mail, firewall, and
web server tasks in additionto updating the web pages once a minute. It has handled this workload 24 hours a day for several years without ever needing to be rebooted. The software is based on the FreeBSD BT848 driver for the WinTV-GO video capture card. Captured video frames are converted to JPEG format for the web with Netpbm, which also adds the timestamps to the pictures. The whole process is driven by a shell script that periodically captures a new image, converts it to a JPEG file, and then rewrites the HTML code of the web page to include the newest picture. Then it updates the web server. For efficiency, only two files are copied each time: one JPEG file and one HTML. As old pictures drop off the web page, they are automatically archived. The update interval, number of pictures in each row, and the total number of rows can be changed on the fly. The time between updates is changed frequently in an attempt to balance the time it takes for the web page to load, with the desire not to miss any of the action! Links: FreeBSD project: http://www.freebsd.org Video capture software: http://telepresence.dmem.strath.ac.uk/bt848/ JPEG tools: http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/ Web hosting: http://www.he.net |
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