Pemaquid Communications

The Eagle Has Landed (sorry, I always wanted to say that…)

If you haven’t already, you might want to join the rapidly-growing group of people who are making the EagleCam, managed by the BioDiversity Research Institute of Gorham, Maine, one of the most popular sites on the Web. So far, viewers have seen romance (eagle-style), battles-against-the-elements (the birds have braved four storms, including an unusually heavy snowfall), suspense (had their eggs survived those storms?) and a surprise plot twist (a chick was born April 11 after biologists had concluded that the birds had failed to keep the eggs warm enough to make it through the cold, harsh spring).

The EagleCam is proving to be Must-See TV. When the eagles returned to their nest about a month ago, the folks at BRI said traffic to the site exploded to 8 million hits in a single day as a result of an Associate Press story on the topic. Traffic died down a bit afterwards, but now that there’s a chick to watch, you can bet there will be another, even bigger spike.

There are a handful of eagle cams out there, but apparently at least Google seems to think BRI’s is important: It’s the #1 search result for “EagleCam”.

In late February BRI asked Pemaquid Communications to redesign the site. The challenge was to get the new look in place before the new addition to the family arrived. How it got done is a case study that could be the subject of a separate post, and the site is still a work in progress, but we got the major features/pages in place.

Future work may include working with National Geographic (provides the live feed) to upgrade the presentation of the live cam object code to bring it in line with Web Standards, placing the rest of the low-traffic back pages into the new look and feel and possibly putting together a photo gallery (BRI has tons of great wildlife photography). And don’t forget the EagleCam Blog (updated by wildlife biologists) and… the LoonCam (inactive right now).

Stay tuned…..