Africam

I discovered this quite some time ago and realized I never blogged about it. There are literally thousands of webcams out on the internet. Most of the cams I've found only netcast still pictures that update periodically, but the Africam has a live video feed complete with sound. It tends to be a bit quirky, but once you get it open it's pretty cool.

As near as I can figure, the cam is near a lodge of some kind (I saw it once in the feed) and is controlled from there. Being in Africa it is probably in a different time zone. So far I've seen the best stuff between 6:00 and 9:00 a.m., I'm in Eastern Time Zone (not sure what the comparison is to GMT). I've managed to see a number of different bird species, antelope, warthogs, monkeys, lions, and this morning I saw an Elephant.

The Africam site has a number of other webcams as well, but they are only still pictures. For the video feed just click on Nkorho Stream near the top left corner.

I haven't used this in class yet as I've only been teaching physics and electronics since I discovered it, but the next time I teach Environmental Science I will. My current plan is to have students monitor the cam and blog about what they see. Each student would be responsible for a different day so that we could get daily, or nearly daily updates. This should give us a rough estimate of the biodiversity of the region.