2016 Camera Appeal - £15,000

Today we start our annual March Camera Appeal.

As always, we will have uninterrupted, 24/7 live camera action from next week right through to September. Don't worry if you miss anything if you're making a cup of tea or fast asleep - we won't be! Any interesting bits we'll bring you the following day as an edited highlight video; and using all five High Definition cameras with professional grade microphones of course.

This week we've had the 10m tower scaffolding at the nest. We re-calibrated everything and cleaned, serviced and tested all the cameras before upgrading everything with the newest firmware versions.

We will also have something brand new. So new in fact, it's a world-first in the osprey world. I can't possibly tell you what it is in case it doesn't work properly - the technology is that new. Suffice to say, if you look hard enough, you'll find it in this blog. Somewhere!

As we were checking the cameras over this week, someone was checking over us...

OSPREY!!! Oh, sorry, it's a common buzzard

To keep all the cameras going plus all the bandwidth we need to beam Terabytes of data every week, the whole job-lot comes to around £10,000 in 2016, the same as the last two years. We get no grant funding, we need to raise this ourselves.

Please help us financially if you possibly can. We've decided again this year to make this a donation based model rather than a pay-per-view type scheme so that if someone genuinely can't afford to pay anything, they'll still be able to watch the wildlife on the Dyfi cams.

There are four ways you can donate:

1. Via the BT MyDonate button on the Live Streaming page (best, as BT don’t take a cut and you can click a box for Gift Aid if you pay tax in the UK – another 25% is added to your amount by the tax man)

2. Via the PayPal button on the Live Streaming page (but no Gift Aid and Paypal take around 3%)

3. By sending a cheque payable to ‘Dyfi Osprey Project’ to:

Emyr Evans
Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust
42 Broad Street
Welshpool
Powys
SY21 8SR

4. At DOP itself when we open 21st March

Here's a summary of what you'll see this year (notwithstanding the little extra surprise of course..)

• Four High Definition 1920 X 1080 cameras in 2016 – all controllable via pan-tilt-zoom operations
• LS camera selection will be altered throughout the season to give the best views possible at a particular time in the breeding season. We start with CAM 2, offering panoramic views of the Dyfi River and the hills of Snowdonia National Park
• Two professional grade microphone systems
• LS will not be switched off in the evening and back on again in the morning. It will stay on continuously throughout the day, for six months.

We’ll do 360 Cam-Tours of the surrounding landscape at various times throughout the summer!

Dyfi Osprey live footage - we aim to make it the best in the world

No promises, but testing last week went so well, we should have the Live Streaming up long before the scheduled 21st March deadline we were working towards. Keep an eye out from Tuesday this week onwards..., the Live Chat is already up.

Wheelchair Lift

So why are we asking for £15,000 this year and not £10,000?

You're probably aware of the wheelchair lift we have been working on since Christmas for the 360 Observatory. Now that the final cost is known - around £29,000, with grant funding (£14,500 from Natural Resources Wales) and kind donations last year from folks wanting to donate to the lift, we're up to around £24,000.

We didn't want to make a large appeal over Christmas as we didn't know the final costings, and it's never a good thing to ask for donations and then have too much money.

So, the intention was to lump it with the March Live Streaming 2016 Appeal, hence the added £5,000 this year.

Wheelchair Lift Update:

• Power cables rolled out and pulled 600m to the Observatory
• Local volunteer Al Davies (and electrician!) connected the 360 Observatory with power last week
• Structural Engineer visited and drawings prepared for the steel beams to support the lift
• Hole cut in the top floor to accommodate the lift

Al Davies: Caution - volunteer at work!

Holey Cow - someone's nicked a part of the floor!

So we have power to the 360 Observatory for the very first time. Not only will this provide the electricity required for the lift but it will also mean we can do a lot more events and activities in the Observatory. It will also run the large Sony screen we had in 2014 with live video and audio from the nest.

Later on this week the huge steel beams and plate go into the floor structure of The Observatory in readiness for the installation itself - Monday week, 14th March. It's tight, but we like working under pressure!

Thank you very much for your generosity. We are so excited about the 2016 season - I bet you are too. Not long to go now.

Keep Calm, Look Up and please press the Donate button!

Glesni returns in 2015