BREAKING NEWS AT 1:45PM, APRIL 10!
The streaming camera is up again thanks to Bill Powers from PixController & Phil Hieber at University of Pittsburgh.

THIS MORNING AT 7:15AM I WROTE:
The sun sets close to 8:00pm in Pittsburgh now, yet it was dark last night at 6:12pm in this image from the Cathedral of Learning falconcam.  You can’t see the lightning or hear the thunder but at this moment E2 is watching a severe thunderstorm crashing around him. Soon it began to hail.

And at 6:12:54 PM the camera went down.  The live video went dead.

Lightning can do crazy things.  Bill Powers of PixController hopes a reboot of the streaming camera will revive it (i.e. turning it off/on indoors).  If not, we’ll have wait until the nesting season is over this summer to fix it.

I know what you’re thinking. No, we cannot go out on the ledge to fix the camera.  These are endangered birds, protected by the PA Game Commission, and it’s forbidden to disturb them and their nests.  Besides, it would be counter productive.  If the fix worked you’d get a nice camera image but the peregrines would quit nesting and there’d be nothing to watch.  And an outdoor fix might not work.  If the damage is electrical it’ll require a whole new camera.

The good news is that the Pitt snapshot camera is working though it has no sound and doesn’t stream video.  You can see its snapshots every 10-15 seconds here.

Dorothy and E2 will continue to incubate their eggs and we’ll see what happens when they’re due to hatch in early May.

Just because we can’t see something streaming live on the Internet doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.  🙂

(photos from the National Aviary falconcams at University of Pittsburgh)