Our Hummingbird Cam

baby hummingbirds from 2013

In 2013, a hummingbird built her nest on our porch and raised two babies.
She came back several of the following years and raised more.
In fall 2018, her nest got destroyed by a pest control worker who thought it was a wasp hive. But, she came back and rebuilt it! That inspired me to hook up the Humi-Cam. The details of that are below the videos.

The first video is one that I saved just after I got the system working, and shows her two eggs, and then Mom herself (her name is Lily). About two days later, the babies (Charm and Strange) hatched.
The system saves the day's videos, and I try to review them each day and pick a few of the best. These are under greatest hits
Below that is the "latest" 20 sec video. This video is uploaded about every 35 seconds. Your browser will likely cache the video file, so if you wait more than a minute and the video doesn't change, click the Reload button above the live video.
I recently added code so that the camera is off from 5:30pm to 7:00am PST. It's too dark for good pictures during the night. I thought of putting up a little adjustable LED near the nest for illumination, but I don't want to harass her too much. I'll just wait until next year and swap the cheap ($9) camera for a dual Day/Night switching camera.

After the live video are some shots of the hardware, R&D. It's a fairly simple project, and cost about $60 altogether. Let me know if you'd like more details on how to build such a system.