If a tree falls in the forest, does anybody see?

Bruce Cockburn asked the audio of the question almost twenty years ago , 1988 to be precise, now in this era of video on demand and streaming video, one assumes the answer is Yes!

Live from Hornby Island, it's the eagle cam. A camera mounted in the woods overlooking a nesting eagle, getting ready for the birth of the young. An attraction that is finding a world wide audience for the feathered mama and papa to be.

Now for Podunkians this is about as exciting as strong yawn, eagles are a huge part of the North coast nature walk as salmon, bears, wolves and all the other critters found here and there. Head down to the waterfront during an unloading session at a fish plant and your eagle count will fill up the abacus in record time.

Eagle's nests can be found all around the Podunk area, but for those residents of the concrete canyons and the bleak escarpments of suburbia, this is the closest they'll ever get to feathered wild life (with the exception of dive bombing pigeons and sparrows we assume).

The site provides live audio as well as a visual view of the eagle's resting spot from up high. It also answers questions from interested observers and has a message board for those inclined to comment, kind of a feathered hackingthemainstraw.

We first discovered the site from the CTV.ca site, which has this story telling how the site was set up and what's been happening. For instance we learn that there are two eagles in the nest, though so far today the Podunk only spotted one, those predad jitters sending the soon to be dad off for quick belt with his other eagle friends perhaps.

From it we also find a number of other wildlife cams out there, just in case our eaglecam dwellers decide to send us on our way. Wanna check out the owls, flamingoes, storks, penguins and others links at the bottom of the CTV.ca story send you on to voyeuristic glory.

But we are definitely Johnny come lately's to this internet hit (millions of hits since it was launched). Delivery date is expected to be April 25th, giving us less than 36 hours to buy just the right gift for the special occasion.

Update: Well it would appear that eagle.cam is not a live stream, since I just checked the site at midnight and well unless Hornby Island moved to the Arctic Circle it's still pretty bright there in the forest, so we assume it's a loop of the daytime footage for those that missed, still interesting but not quite time sensitive.