The Bird Feeder Cam is a window bird feeder, on the second floor of my house in Coatesville, in southeastern Pennsylvania, which is at Latitude: 40 degrees, 1 Min. 39 Sec.; and Longitude: -75 degrees, 51 Min. 56.5 Sec., and in Timezone: GMT -5 (Eastern Standard). I usually use sunflower kernels (no shells), although sometimes I get different kinds of seed. The camera was a Logitech QuickCam® Pro USB (Dark Focus Ring), but as of June 5th, 2011 the camera is a Logitech® HD Pro Webcam C910. The Bird Feeder Cam was originally set up on December 29th, 2002. The feeder is a Droll Yankee Winner® (W-1). I'm using Active WebCam from PY Software as the image capture software.
The picture only gets updated during daylight hours here, Eastern Time (ET). So between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. in the summer, and 7:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. in the winter time the camera should be operating. After those hours, you should just see the last two pictures captured.
We saw the first birds on the feeder on March 23rd, 2003, even though I installed the feeder on December 29th, 2002.
You'll notice that the lighting in many of the archived pictures isn't quite right. The trouble is that this feeder is on the shaded north side of the house, and the background tends to be brightly illuminated, backlighting the birds and feeder. I even tried shining a light through the window onto the feeder, and the results were poor, except when it was dark out, as on 3/26/2003, and you can see a reflection of the camera in that one. Anyway, I partially solved the problem by moving the camera about six inches higher, and angling it down, so the background is the dimmer side lawn and driveway, rather than the brightly lit sky and our neighbor's house. In the winter the snow on the ground still causes the same type of lighting problems though. I think that better software that dynamically adjusts the exposure would help... oh well.
Most of the pictures below and most of the birds that have been attracted so far are finches. The ones with some red on them are house finches, yellow are gold finches. I seem to get a wider variety on one of my other feeders, even though I use the same feed, sunflower kernels. There is also a picture of a Carolina Wren here. You don't see them on feeders too often, but they will eat the sunflower kernels.
On May 29th, 2003, the feeder fell off the window.... It has fallen off a number of times, usually when it is really windy out. Another time in 2003 when it fell off, I couldn't find the bottom suction cup, so it became even more likely to fall off.
On October 19th 2006, in windy conditions, the feeder fell off the window and broke. I ordered new feeder from Amazon and it arrived October 25th.
Archive with thumbnails: Not an archive of all pictures ever taken, but has all the pictures I thought were interesting enough to save. The pictures below are a subset of the archive. I have cleaned and color-enhanced these pictures (for your viewing pleasure) as they never seem to be quite right directly from the camera.