Penguin migration in Patagonia streamed for all to see

22 Sep 2007 | 07:45 BST

By Fernando Cassia in Argentina

Privacy, they have heard of it

THE GOVERNMENT of the southern province of Chubut in the Patagonia region of Argentina, is trying something new to entice tourists to visit this far land: it installed video cameras on the shores to stream the yearly arrival of penguins.

Every year in late September up to 500,000 Magellanic Penguins arrive in pairs to the coasts of Punta Tombo to couple and bear their young. La wackypedia say they come from the southern shores of Brazil, surely escaping the loud voices and samba dancing in the streets, and choosing the peace and quiet of Argentine Patagonia for their romantic escapade.

Stream viewed on SeaMonkey with the MPlayer plug-in

~~Like~~ unlike humans, these little cute and threatened species mate with the same partner year after year. According to wackypedia, "Males reclaim the burrow from the previous year and wait to reconnect with their female partners. The females are able to recognize their mates through their call alone". And they pay no roaming charges!.

After their arrival, which you can see now on the Interweb, they lay about 20 nests per 1076 square feet. Two eggs are laid and the incubation period lasts about 40 days, after which usually only one of the offspring survives. Wackypedia describes these penguins as "very shy" and that's why even when you visit in person to the Punta Tombo marine reserve, you have to watch them from a safe distance using binoculars. During this period, couples protect their nests from birds and other predators, while the parents take turns to go to the sea for food.

Full Screen View, WMP on Windows

The idea to do this webcam venture apparently came from the provincial government, with the local public TV channel being in charge of the cameras and the streaming done by a local firm dubbed "Lupa Corporation". Along the same route that leads to Punta Tombo is the town of Gaiman, an old colony of Welsh immigrants which maintains its ethnic traditions. Apparently webcasting a session of Welsh tea wasn't as attractive as the little seabirds so there's no streaming of the tea sessions. If the web stream doesn't work for you you can watch the broadcast by tuning your old fashioned -and better looking- satellite dish with these parameters:

    * Satellite: AMC6
    * Uplink Frequency: 13942
    * Downlink Frequency: 11642
    * FEC: 3/4
    * Symbol Rate: 3704
    * Vertical

Unfortunately, what looks like a small ISP contracted by the government to do the streaming, choose to use Windows Media for this chore, that means that things are not as easy as they could be for Linux and non-Microsoft users. Fortunately MPlayer 1.0 along with the MPlayer plug-in for Mozilla seem to handle MMS just fine. But depending on your Linux distro you might need to install those. In any case have patience because their server is surely overloaded by all the connection attempts from around the world.

The introductory site is available in several languages

I hope that the government of Chubut learns the lesson and next year contracts a serious company with plenty of bandwidth. I bet Google, for instance, which recently opened its Buenos Aires headquarters, would be the ideal company to offer a time-delayed version of the stream -say in one-hour segments- via Google Video.

A short intro on the little cute seabirds

For those interested, the entry URL is this one. And the streaming URLs loaded by the page -one using http and the other the proprietary MMS protocol are here and here respectively. If you have MPlayer 1.0rc1 or higher, it should work without further ado or fiddling with Windows DLLs.

Stream embedded in the web page

In any case, it even works on non-IE browsers on Winders -I used SeaMonkey 1.1- just be patient and keep hitting Play in case it disconnects, you'll eventually get video. If you get a black on white background text message in Spanish, it says "attempting connection", at that point don't press anything and wait about 20 seconds. If you're lucky, the busy penguins will appear on your browser window. Also consider that time down here is GMT-3. The stream will run only until the 23th or 30th night, depending on whom you ask. Apparently after that, the penguins will end their frantic activity and start thinking about their newly acquired international fame thanks to the webcams.µ

L'INQS
Penguins on Camera - streaming website (gov.ar)
Magellanic Penguins: Interesting thing of the day
Punta Tombo
Run Linux? You need the MPlayer plug-in for Mozilla, and MPlayer, of course
Penguins of the World

Click here to print

Close the window