You’ve seen them. Those video clips of porch pirates helping themselves to packages left on doorsteps. If you’re fortunate, the ones you see include a satisfying gotcha at the end, when the thief gets dusted with spray paint or some other tell-tail punishment for their illegal behavior.
Next time you’re checking your security cam, keep an eye out for birds! The authors’ neighbor sent a photo of this Turkey Vulture caught on the security cam snooping around on the deck. (Courtesy of Jason Hudson)
Consider adding another element to your viewing: birding!
Case in point: A scavenger that was captured on an automated security cam suspiciously sizing up a BBQ grill on the back deck at home of a friend of ours. “Is this a Turkey Vulture?” he asked, in reference to a photo of the incident.
The bird was indeed a Turkey Vulture.
Hard to know what it was that drew the vulture to the deck, but we were fascinated to learn that Turkey Vultures engage in this kind of behavior, at least occasionally. We don’t recall ever seeing one snooping around a house in this way, not here in Maine, anyway.
We expect more and more people are finding interesting birds and other creatures on their automated cameras attached to their homes nowadays.
These pigeons were minding their own business on the Southport Bridge In Boothbay when the Google Street View camera snapped their portrait.
Cameras of another kind have led to an interesting pastime for some bird enthusiasts. Google Maps provide a 360-degree street view photo for many, perhaps most, addresses in the U.S. and many other parts of the world. You may be surprised to learn that these photos are captured by a person driving around with a special camera mounted on the vehicle that snaps a photo at precise intervals. It’s now possible (for better or worse) to open up Google Maps and zoom in to a particular location to see the scene as if you were standing on the road at that place.
The photos are taken without consideration of the presence or absence of birds (or other creatures, including humans). So occasionally, birds appear in one of these images. Maine Audubon’s Nick Lund discovered this a few years ago and began looking around to see what birds he could identify from these images. Eventually, he shared news of this obsession with others and started a Facebook group. The group now has thousands of participants who have reported finding and identifying as many as a thousand species!
The Google Street View camera captured this Laughing Gull that was seemingly contemplating its next meal on the seaweed-covered shore of Southport.
This prompted us to check Google Street View images for some familiar spots around Maine and made IDs in the Boothbay region. In one image, we spotted a Laughing Gull near Lobsterman’s Wharf, near the bridge in East Boothbay. The bird is somewhat blurry and far off, but you can nonetheless see its distinctive black hood and black wingtips. That’s often how the birds appear—blurry and cryptic—as the primary targets are the homes and businesses, not birds and wildlife.
We checked the Google Street View images for the Southport Bridge, and the image taken from the middle of it shows some of the pigeons that regularly hang out there. Nearby, another view shows the familiar figure of a Herring Gull, with light gray back and white head, as it searches for food in the brown-and-orange rockweed.
All of this technological snooping on the natural world seems a wee bit weird and voyeuristic, and yet we keep thinking of new places to check. What will be next?
There’s no better time to stay on top of those security cams than the holidays. Next time you’re on the lookout for those porch pirates, keep a watchful eye out for birds, too. Better yet, make a list and start checking it twice!
—Jeff and Allison Wells
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