A case study of Crowdsourcing the monitoring of the CahowCam and other Wildlife Cams.
The Nonsuch Expeditions CahowCams have once again this year been live streaming for 6+ months from the underground Cahow burrows on Nonsuch Island. Whilst these 24/7 video streams present many opportunities to learn more about our subjects, it is impossible (and unrealistic) to expect our small team to be monitoring them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 6+ months, and invariably significant events are missed.
This year our online viewers watched over 8.5 million minutes of CahowCam video over the 6 month period, all logging in when their schedules permit from different time zones around the world. This resulted in there being multiple if not hundreds or thousands of viewers online at any one point in time, and given the right tools they were able to log and and report significant events to us which we could then re-confirm by going back to the video archive being created at Cornell.
As a perfect example, on March 20th 2017, at 2:50 am local time, a planarian flatworm (possibly the snail eating variety) dropped from the roof onto the back of our Cahow chick. Our local Team was online but not watching at that exact moment, however one of our regular viewers who lives in Japan, was not only watching but recognized that this was something to possibly be concerned about and tweeted to us and other followers tagging our @BermudaCahowCam Twitter account including video frame grabs showing the intruder.
Bermuda is known to have three varieties of flatworms, two of which are flesh eaters that will for example kill and eat snails. The variety known to be on Nonsuch targets primarily earth worms, however there was concern that if this one was of the snail eating variety it might somehow harm the young Cahow chick. Alerted by our Twitter feed we woke up Jeremy who started preparing to go to the boat to rush out to Nonsuch to remove the worm, whilst in parallel we reached out to our partners at Cornell to review the high resolution footage of the intrusion.
Fortuntaley Cornell was quickly able to confirm from their higher resolution video that the worm could be seen exiting the burrow via the tunnel a few minutes after it arrived so the "crisis" was averted, nonetheless this is a very good example of how we can and should crowdsource our followers to help monitor these feeds. There were in fact many other never before documented incidents captured this season including an adult Cahow intruder that almost killed, our at the time, very young chick.
This year once "Shadow" fledged and the season officially wrapped up, we left the camera running to document what would happen to the nest after the Cahows left, and sure enough, as first documented last year, a very lost Storm Petrel moved in to make a nest and try to attract a mate. As much of this activity happens between midnight and 5 am our Citizen Scientist followers are again helping log his activities including a "battle" with two crabs that we might otherwise have missed.