What animal cams say about us

Our interactions with nature are increasingly mediated by technology. We scroll through wildlife feeds on TikTok. We use Instagram to plan hikes. Even in the wilderness, we religiously bring our phones to document the experience. And then there are animal cams.

Since the 1990s, people have fawned over livestreams of cute pandas and colorful fish. One could argue that animal cams another example of how we’ve jammed a screen between ourselves and the wild. But the story of Jackie the bald eagle presents a different perspective: one in which technology might bring us closer to our fellow creatures.

Producer Dean Russell speaks with Endless Thread co-host Ben Brock Johnson about the potential upsides of technonaturalism.

Show notes:

This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Dean Russell: Ben Brock Johnson.

Ben Brock Johnson: Dean Davies Russell. What's your middle name?

Dean: Pfft. You'll never know.

Ben: Oh, come on!

Dean: What is the longest you've ever watched an animal? Ideally, in the wild.

Ben: I'm going to say a good half an hour.

Dean: What happened? What was going on?

Ben: I come across wild animals relatively frequently because of where I live. And I guess everybody has a different way of thinking about how they interact with animals in the wild, but my philosophy is essentially, when I see a wild animal, to be still and just revel in the opportunity that I am receiving.

Dean: Knowing a little about you, that both makes a lot of sense and surprises me.

Ben: I'm capable of being still for long periods of time, believe it or not.

Dean: The reason that I ask is: Kind of like you, I see wild animals relatively frequently, but watching them, truly sitting there for hours and observing, I don't get to do that too much. This past winter, however, my wife told me about something, or someone, who would change that.

(An eagle cries.)

Dean: Her name is Jackie.

Sandy Steers: A lot of people refer to her as the queen of the eagles. I think that's a good description.

Dean: Queen of the eagles! Not to be confused with the lord of the eagles.

[Pippin Took in The Lord of the Rings: The eagles are coming!]

Dean: Ben, the voice you heard before Pippin is Sandy Steers. She's Jackie's neighbor. She lives just outside of Big Bear Valley in Southern California.

Sandy: I just love animals. I've been loving animals since I was as small as I can remember.

Dean: Jackie is a star, a bald eagle animal cam star.

Ben: What is this, 1999?

Dean: To be honest, that was my reaction, too, when I first heard about Jackie. So often, when we talk about animal cams, it's at a very surface level. We never get beyond "oh how cute." But as I looked into Jackie's story, I ended up learning quite a bit about the peculiar challenges of animal cam-ing. I also started to understand something better that isn't on screen: us. And our evolving relationship with the natural world.

Ben: Alright, I'm here for it. I'll watch the stream, or listen to the stream, in this case. Endless Thread. WBUR. Ben and Dean on the live cam animal beat.

Dean: Today's episode? A shorty to close out Earth Week. "The Jackie Show."

Ben: (Singing.) After these messages, we'll be right back.

Dean: Let's watch.

(An eagle flies into an occupied nest.)

Ben: Whoa! An eagle partner just landed in the nest, swooped in, and landed in the nest.

(Jackie the eagle vocalizes.)

Ben: What's interesting about this, Dean, is the first time you told me about this story, I was like, OK. And I had this distinct memory of the first of these, the first animal cam experience that I had. Like, I remember when this was like a big thing.

And then when you showed me Jackie, I was like, Oh, it was Jackie. Like Jackie was the one. The first animal cam I really discovered. And it's this kind of very iconic, giant eagle nest in the top of a pine tree, looking out over other pine trees and over a huge body of water in low-lying mountains or something.

Dean: Thousands of people will be watching Jackie and her mate at any given moment. Jackie has a combined following on YouTube and other platforms of about one million.

Ben: There're lots of comments coming in.

Sandy: We had, you know, no idea that it was going to be as big as it's gotten.

Dean: Sandy Steers, by the way, she is the reason that the Jackie show exists. She's the head of Friends of Big Bear Valley, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving...

Sandy: ...the seventh-most biologically diverse place in the country.

Dean: It is a 15-mile-long strip of wilderness up in the San Bernardino Mountains. It's got pinyon pines and knob cone pines and ponderosa pines and...

Sandy: ...black bears, mountain lions, bobcats, tree squirrels, dusky-footed woodrats... 

Ben: Dusky-footed woodrats. That's going to be the name of my next band. Dusky-footed woodrats.

Dean: Big Bear didn't have bald eagles, at least not nesting there, until 2012. That's when our story begins. When two mates, Lucy and Ricky, showed up and built a nest high in the trees. This was pre-camera. A friend showed Sandy the nest. And one day, when she went out with a scope, she saw a bitty ball of feathers.

Sandy: I was totally enthralled, and I spent the winter standing out in a parking lot, no matter what the weather was, for three or four hours a day, watching that chick grow up. 

Dean: Rain or shine or The Revenant-style snow, because they get a lot of snow, she kept finding herself in that parking lot watching this chick named Jack, after a long-time birding volunteer. Eventually, she realized that Jack was really Jackie.

Sandy: She would jump up and down, bouncing and flapping her wings. And I just felt like I was connecting and learning about her life from a different perspective.

Ben: Jackie the chick! She was made for the little screen.

Dean: Indeed, indeed. And as you mentioned, you know, there's a history here. There's a long history to animal cams. I dug back, and the first one, at least that people can agree upon, was The Amazing FishCam, which came out in 1994. Do you remember that at all?

Ben: No, I don't remember that. The thing that it made me think of is that singing bass thing that you can hang on the wall and it turns and yells at you or whatever. But that's the closest I get.

Dean: The Amazing FishCam was set up in the offices of a then-little-known internet browser company called Netscape. The camera streamed images of a tiny fish tank. The people behind it said it was mostly created to test Netscape features at the time. But it ended up attracting kind of a lot of attention.

Ben: That's wild, the idea that they basically — I mean, I get it, the idea that you would build this thing in order to test the bandwidth of a browser.

Dean: As you well know, this picked up steam, other people started doing it, and in the early 2010s, the Catalina Islands had an eagle cam as well. So Sandy, after a few years of watching Ricky and Lucy — Jackie fledged and peaced out — but after a few years of watching Ricky and Lucy, Sandy thought, Why not do the same?

Any guesses on how much it cost to set up?

Ben: This is like one of those tricky things, right? Because camera technology is cheap, internet technology is cheap, but really resilient camera technology getting put up inside of an eagle's nest? I'm going to guess 60 grand.

Sandy: It was over $10,000. That's why it took us two years to raise that much money.

Ben: Oh, well, please. $10,000? No problem. Pocket change.

Dean: I know, jeez, Louise. I was shocked. I was shocked. I mean, $10,000, that's to cover not just the equipment, but the permits, and they also needed to find a guy willing to climb 145 feet up into a Jeffrey Pine. This is not your average animal cam, and that's part of the draw. It's not an aquarium. It's not a zoo. This is really out there — or up there — and it's not easy to set up. Once they did, once they got everything perfect and the camera trained on the nest, nesting season was approaching, everyone was excited to see this up close. But...

Sandy: We didn't realize it at the time, but the parents had already moved their nest to about a quarter mile away.

Ben: Oh no.

Dean: Lucy and Ricky had moved. The camera was looking at an empty nest for a week, and then a month, and then a year, and nothing happened.

(Wind blows over an empty nest.)

Sandy: But the following year is when Jackie was old enough.

Dean: Old enough to start mating. Five years old, to be exact, and that meant that Jackie needed a nest. She chose the one just a few feet in front of the camera. And we'll get to her rise in just a flap of the feather.

[SPONSOR BREAK]

Dean: Ben, there's watching animals and there's observing animals. Sandy Steers, with a newly installed live camera, was observing Jackie the eagle. And one of the things that stood out to me and made it different from other animal cams is this documentation. So click this link right here.

Ben: I'm opening up a Google doc. It has some emoji in it. It appears to be 150 pages long. Holy moly! So, as near as I can tell, what I'm looking at is a log of activity?

Dean: Yes, this is an observation log. What is incredible here is the detail, 150 pages for one season, mind you. When the camera first started, it was Sandy noting everything that she saw: 5:38 pm, Jackie visits the nest; 7:02 pm, Jackie brings a stick; 4:11 am and 47 seconds, Jackie vocalizes. So much of science today is tests and labs. Old-school naturalists used to do this kind of observing. Actions are data. And data reveals patterns. And patterns help us understand animals better.

Sandy: I have notebooks full of watching when they came in, what time they came in, how often they were there, did they bring a stick. Everything they did, I documented it.

Dean: As a side note, there's also a daily log for Fiona and Freddie sightings. These are two tiny San Bernardino flying squirrels that live just below the nest and miraculously haven't been eaten, possibly because bald eagles tend to go for fish, and the squirrels are fast.

Sandy: Sometimes, when we record them, we have to put the camera and play it back on slow-motion to even be able to see that they were there.

Dean: And now, instead of Sandy taking notes, Jackie is so popular that people around the world volunteer to watch and take notes in shifts. The noteworthy things are time-stamped so that anyone can kind of go back and see what happened. This is citizen science. And because of that, viewers, they have seen the drama of Jackie's life unfold. For instance, they know when Jackie met Mr. B, a male eagle, in 2017.

Ben: Do eagles mate for life?

Dean: A lot of people wonder that, and the answer comes with the drama. Because in the year that Jackie and Mr. B raised a chick...

Sandy: That late summer, Shadow showed up at the nest. 

Ben: Ooh, Shadow. Tall, dark, and mysterious.

Dean: Yeah, after Mr. B and Jackie mated and had a chick, Shadow, this other suitor, he shows up. He's about two years younger than Jackie at this point — she's seven, he's five. And he starts trying to break up the happy couple. Mr. B, he keeps chasing Shadow away, Shadow comes back. Jackie starts chasing him away, Shadow comes back. And finally, a sort of brawl unfolds on the camera.

Ben: Oh no.

Dean: Mr. B starts poking at Shadow with his beak, and Shadow stands up to dodge him. And then he hunches back down into fight pose. And then Mr. B tries again, but Shadow again stands up to dodge.

Sandy: It was like one of those punching dummies. He'd just lean backward and then stand back up, and Mr. B couldn't get him to leave. And he just kept standing there and finally Mr. B left. And that was the last time we saw him. So it looked like that was a totally nonviolent showdown, and Shadow won.

Ben: This is dramatic.

Dean: Yeah, because of this wild camera, people get to see something they wouldn't see otherwise. Bald eagles are known for mating for life. In some circumstances, there are exceptions. Jackie and Mr. B broke up. Jackie and Shadow are still together.

And watching their lives feels like watching a domestic drama. But more in The Truman Show way, where we see every second of their lives.

(Jackie vocalizes.)

Dean: A good window into this Truman Show life might be this current season. So, as mentioned, I started checking in on Jackie this year. I got to see the patterns of life for myself. Which started this past fall, when Jackie and Shadow actually mated on camera. And after mating? Ben, can you read this daily log from January 25th?

Ben: OK, it says "1/25 Recap...Egg number one is laid at 16:55...AND IT'S BEAUTIFUL!" All caps.

Dean: People get really pumped when this first egg is laid. Jackie usually lays two eggs and she laid three.

Ben: Wow.

Dean: All throughout the winter they are incubating these eggs. There are news articles coming out about them, too, from NBC and CBS and LA Times.

Ben: Not in People Magazine though, because they wouldn't put them in there. They put them in Eagle Magazine.

Dean: And part of the fun is in seeing their dynamics. So one issue is that the parents are supposed to trade incubation duty. Jackie is often very reluctant to let Shadow take over and sit on the eggs.

Sandy: The way I read it is, Jackie trusts Jackie.

Dean: So, Shadow has developed a bunch of techniques to persuade or trick Jackie.

Ben: I am also not trusted and have also come up with some ways around it.

Dean: Well, I'd be curious what your patterns are, but Shadow, he'll argue out loud. Sometimes he'll mess around with sticks — he really likes sticks for some reason.

Ben: Again, same, to be honest.

Dean: So sometimes he'll pretend like he's just messing with some sticks, and then he'll all of a sudden start using the stick to sort of gently push Jackie away.

And Shadow does get to do what they call "Daddy Duty." Once Jackie has gone off for a bit, did her thing, fished, when she comes back, she wants Shadow to get off the eggs immediately. He's often resistant. So Jackie has her own techniques to kind of get him off.

Sandy: One of them is what I've named "twerpling." And it's a very soft, little guttural sound that she makes, like she's trying to sweet-talk him.

(Jackie twerples.) 

Dean: For the most part, though, Jackie rules the nest.

Sandy: We got four feet of snow, and all during that snow, over 62 hours, Jackie was on the nest. She did not take a break other than to relieve herself off the side of the nest.

Ben: Committed. Jackie is very committed.

Dean: Very much. And to sit there and watch an eagle incubate her eggs is to enter a sort of meditative state. You see how one animal can be so dedicated to something, so protective, so enamored with the potential for life, it's hard not to get invested. And so people get invested.

[Marla Tellez on FOX 11 Los Angeles: World-famous eagle couple Jackie and Shadow, telling everyone within earshot to stay away from the nest. They're protecting three eggs, the first of which could hatch as soon as Thursday.]

Dean: Normal incubation takes about 35 days. And watching an egg hatch, it's truly a wonderful and beautiful thing. So on March 1st, 2024, 35 days after the first egg is laid, everyone is watching and waiting and excited...

...but the eggs don't hatch.

Ben: Oh no.

Dean: And more time passes, the parents keep incubating. Nothing happens. And it gets to the point where Sandy's team, they have to make public posts saying, Hey, these eggs probably will never hatch.

Sandy: That's one of the hardest parts of doing all of this, is people want us to guarantee that there's going to be a good outcome. People want us to explain why things are not happening or why things are happening. And sadly, we don't know exactly why things are happening. It's nature.

Dean: This is sad. But also interesting to be watching and see messages of support come in for this eagle, who, as far as I know, cannot read English.

And it's also a learning lesson. With climate change, extreme storms are projected to become more intense, which will maybe hurt the eagle populations. But Sandy said this wasn't climate change. This was just nature. Even in good times, about half the time, eggs don't hatch.

Sandy: It's hard to be in nature, and I think people don't realize that, don't realize how difficult it is for nature to do what it does.

Ben: Dean, did you just bring me this story to bum me out about how hard it is for nature? Tell me more.

Dean: I didn't. I promise you that I didn't. Jackie and Shadow are healthy. And they will have another shot next season. So we don't need to be too sad. A little sad is OK, though, because it gets to one of the things that is magical about all this. Here are two birds living their lives, and maybe unbeknownst to them, they have a whole audience rooting for them.

Ben: There's something powerful about that.

Dean: I also think this story illustrates the way we engage with nature. These days, most of our experiences are mediated by technology. We are, or have become, technonaturalists. Instead of watching eagles with a scope in a parking lot buried in snow, we watch on a screen. Even when we are out in nature, we're rarely without a phone to document the experience or read a map. And that is a thing that generally bums me out. But when I mentioned this to Sandy, she pointed out..

Sandy: ...that all of this technology can make us appreciate and be more connected to nature at the same time, rather than shutting it out of our lives.

Dean: Sandy gets comments often from Jackie fans who say, because of this live cam, they have started watching an osprey nest or a bluebird nest near their homes. They have gotten invested in nature right outside.

Sandy: And it's things that they said they wouldn't have paid attention to before. They would have just been going about their business being busy with everyday things, and now they realize that there are lots of things going on out there, that all those animals have their own daily lives. And they're taking a moment to look at them.

Dean: So, again, what the Jackie show made me realize is that we are technonaturalists. And yes, there are downsides to that. But there are also beautiful, wonderful upsides.

Ben: Yeah, I think that's right. Number One, I love working in a giant Google with several hundred or a thousand of my closest friends. And Number Two, you shouldn't just be focused on human streamers. We gotta be inclusive of the animal streamers, too. So let's all do that. I'm going to go find a dolphin cam. I think that's my plan. Alright, yeah, I'm going to go do that. Bye, y'all!

Dean: By the way, if you’re looking for Jackie and Shadow on the live feed right now, you might be slightly out of luck. Summer is upon us and they are out hunting and fishing and whatnot. However, they still drop by the nest. You can see plenty of their videos on YouTube. Check them out. They’re super fun.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written by me, Dean Russell, and hosted by Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

The rest of our team is Katelyn Harrop, Samata Joshi, Frannie Monahan, Grace Tatter, Paul Vaitkus, Matt Reed, Cici Yu, and the greatest animal lover of them all, Amory Sivertson.

Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and Eagle Magazine, available wherever you stand in line for groceries.

If you have an unsolved mystery or an untold history or you just want to tell us what your favorite animal cam is, hit us up: Endless Thread at WBUR dot org.