Local Wildlife Group Launches Live Baby Bird Webcam

What do orphaned baby gulls and ducklings do when no one’s around? Frenzied activity followed by fluffy power naps, for starters, if the new webcam initiative at International Bird Rescue’s San Francisco Bay center in Fairfield is any guide.

Founded in 1971, our organization receives countless baby birds every year, many imperiled by the urban areas in which many are raised.

Egrets and herons nest in a traffic median, where baby birds often fall to the ground as traffic whizzes by, and are brought to the San Francisco Bay Oiled Bird Care and Education Center (managed by International Bird Rescue). Young seabirds end up stuck in industrial sludge ponds and need to be expertly washed. One mallard duckling was even successfully hatched weeks after its mother died from being struck by a car.

To raise awareness of these issues, we recently launched The BirdCam Project, a live look at the care of aquatic birds — our specialty in the animal rehab world — as well as other bird species.

While the project offers an unobtrusive glimpse at these wonderful birds for online viewers, an added bonus of BirdCam is that it gives our rehabilitation staff a new monitoring tool for the birds they care for every day.

After a few days on screen, the birds are transferred to larger pens as they grow, leaving the camera available for new chicks. American Coots, Killdeer and Pied-billed Grebes are all common birds at the center that could be featured in the coming weeks.

BirdCam offers also viewers the opportunity to sponsor a daily broadcast of orphaned birds in care — a live-video, symbolic bird adoption that helps International Bird Rescue keep BirdCam on the air and aids in fulfilling the wildlife group’s educational mission.

As this project progresses, we’ll be spotlighting many different adult birds as well, including brown pelicans, herons and rarely seen species in International Bird Rescue’s care.

For more information, visit birdrescue.org.