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Wildlife cams bring nature up close and personal

Can a new family get a little peace around here? Apparently not, if you are a bird or almost any other species these days. Wildlife cams are proliferating around Pennsylvania and beyond and who can resist them? You can watch grizzly bears fish in Alaska or fish flitting about a reef in the Cayman Islands, and oh, the birds, cranes, owls,eagles, hawks. There is live streaming galore out there to guarantee you get little else done in a day.

Can a new family get a little peace around here?

Apparently not, if you are a bird or almost any other species these days. Wildlife cams are proliferating around Pennsylvania and beyond and who can resist them? You can watch grizzly bears fish in Alaska or gaze at fish flitting about a reef in the Cayman Islands, and oh, the birds - cranes, owls, eagles, hawks - that taken over the Internet. There is live streaming galore out there to guarantee you get little else done in a day.

One of the newest cameras in the Commonwealth was mounted  in a tree high above Codorus Lake in York County by the Pennsylvania Game Commission and gives animal lovers a, well, bird's eye view of a bald eagle's nest. This morning the female was busy straightening the nest which got a dusting a snow last night, covering a single egg laid on Valentine's Day.

Nearly driven to extinction by the use of the pesticide DDT in the 1960s, the bald eagle has made a soaring comeback across the nation and can be found nesting along the upper Delaware River and other waterways in the state.

Of course the granddaddy of nest cameras -  "falcon cam"  - has been tracking mating and nesting activity on the ledge atop the Rachel Carson state office building in Harrisburg for more than a decade.

The 15-story building houses the departments of Envrionmental Protection and Conservation and Natural Resources. (And in a brilliant coincidence, it was the Pennsylvania-born scientist Rachel Carson who first identified DDT as a environmental threat.)

Mating rituals generally heat up around Valentine's Day. That cam goes live on March 2.

There are many more live cams peering into nests around the country The featured camera on one web site today is a great horned owl nest in Georgia.

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