The Den Cam Team made the difficult decision today to delay installation of the camera at Lily and Hope’s den. Bill Powers and his engineers at PixController, Inc. in Pennsylvania have been working long and hard to put together a solution to stream video 24x7 from such a remote location. At this point a key piece of the setup is missing—a static IP address from Verizon. Without that static IP address, WildEarth can’t reliably pull the den cam video stream—and, if they can’t pull it, they can’t push it out to the Internet for us all to see. We can’t install a den cam solution that we know isn’t reliable.
However, progress IS being made. Today a propane heater was installed in the den shed to keep the temperature within the tolerance levels for the equipment it will eventually house. This weekend we’ll complete other work on the den shed—like installing solar panels—so everything will be a ready as possible for the camera equipment when it arrives. The weather has warmed some and we are taking that as a good omen that the den cam will come together soon.
We are all anxious for this den cam to be installed. We recently received a query from Crissy Ravelo, PRE K teacher at Jack D Gordon Elementary School in Miami, Florida. She sent along a picture of her bulletin board. It shows how eager her class is for the cam to go live—and they’re spreading the word about bear.org too.
Stay tuned—we’ll post the new install date as soon as it's determined!
The delay in the den cam coincides with problems with the new bear.org website. The new template is conflicting with payment processing for web store purchases and donations. Did we mention Murphy’s Law in an earlier update? The den cam delay buys us a little extra time to sort out the bear.org issues.
Don’t believe everything you read. A recent web news article indicated we had ‘confirmed’ that Lily is pregnant. Not so. We suspect Lily is pregnant, but we won’t know for sure until she goes into labor in late January.
We continue to be amazed by the generosity of Lily fans and by the hard work Team Bear has done on the fundraising efforts. When we think back to where the debt was a year ago, we are humbled. ‘Thank You’ doesn’t seem enough.
And ‘Thank You’ to Team Protect for conducting a top notch letter-writing campaign for protection of radio-collared bears. Copies of the letters are still arriving.
Thank you for your continuing interest and support of our research and education efforts.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center