Cosworthlady
Well-known member
A very reliable observer thought they saw an osprey on Cam number 2 at 8.16am this morning. I wonder if anyone else saw this?
i heard a rumour too but no one can confirm.
A very reliable observer thought they saw an osprey on Cam number 2 at 8.16am this morning. I wonder if anyone else saw this?
i heard a rumour too but no one can confirm.
spoke to someone at The centre and there wasn't an osprey yesterday. However Ej has caught LG with their pants down today lol. Glad to see her back though. X
Had not realised they were stopping us doing that as well Tiger but when I saw your comment remembered noticing the new copyright notice.Pity we are not allowed to take captures!
Pity we are not allowed to take captures!
Thank you, Delia. I look forward to getting to know all of you. I feel a kinship for I am a second generation American. My grandfather was from Edinburgh.
Hallo everyone - also fed up with the SWT change and it is great to find you,
I was so angry I sent off an email to them - see response below. Very unhelpful but more or less a reply by return.
Dear Pat,
Thank you for your email. We appreciate your views regarding our decision to remove the commenting facility from our Loch of the Lowes blog. As you rightly point out, there are certainly benefits to running a wildlife blog on this scale, however management issues continued to challenge us as the blog continued to grow. It was a difficult decision for us to make, however with limited resources we are simply unable to sustain a moderation service for the high volumes of comments we receive. Unfortunately using volunteer moderators would also require high volumes of staff time and has been ruled out at this point in time.
We hope you enjoy watching our web cams and following the blog this season.
I have looked into the issue with the osprey mailbox, unfortunately there appears to be an issue and I have asked our IT department to action this today. Please accept my apologies for that.
Kind regards
Roxanne K King
Marketing and Business Development
Scottish Wildlife Trust
I have to say that having (briefly) been a moderator on a conservation organisation's forum that I understand this response. I found that I had not the time to actively moderate the forum and any issues I had would be put to other people too before I could be sure about say, removing a post. This begs the question as to whether volunteers could do this job? In my opinion, no because it would be impossible to give them all the appropriate briefings about policy that they would need to do this job. In reality, volunteer staff should know their area but by contrast, paid staff have other duties unless (and this is rare in coservation if not, unknown) they are specifically paid to look after online forums.
I am not really in on what has happened here below the surface but I suspect a lot of things have come to light out of innocent enthusiasm. I have worked with a wildlife trust and I know that their funds are not what we would hope they would be, which leads to:
1, It is essential that they control their own publicity and that includes the carefully considered timing to put out press releases. The RSPB does not have this problem because they operate over a wider base and they can command far more attention by say, an osprey story than we can generate by our private efforts. However, the wildlife trusts can easily be undermined by a forum post, a social network post or even a captured clip on YouTube...this leads to...
2, Copyright law is not really complicated but it is painfully subtle - anything on the Internet is assumed to be in the public domain but this has its limits. Film feeds are provided by a service and even though a straightforward link on Facebook will give all the relevant information, strictly speaking, it should still be officially sanctioned by the service provider. This is far from a trivial matter because information written on forums is placed on the service provider's facilities too and gleaning that information for a book without appropriate authorisation from the writers and providers is at best, unethical but at worst, illegal.
All this can be avoided by writing to the appropriate people and gathering permissions. Once this is gained, it does not matter whether all proceeds of a publication go to the charity of donations are made to the project because it is sanctioned. Unfortunately, the Internet has lulled into a false sense of security over copyright issues and I can see both sides of the argument.
I hope this is of some help to everyone involved in this debate and I thank one of my friends for telling me about this topic. Ospreys are super-cool and I wish I could see one on my local patch even though I have been to Loch Garten. Keep watching the skies (erm...webcams!).
I have to say that having (briefly) been a moderator on a conservation organisation's forum that I understand this response. I found that I had not the time to actively moderate the forum and any issues I had would be put to other people too before I could be sure about say, removing a post. This begs the question as to whether volunteers could do this job? In my opinion, no because it would be impossible to give them all the appropriate briefings about policy that they would need to do this job. In reality, volunteer staff should know their area but by contrast, paid staff have other duties unless (and this is rare in coservation if not, unknown) they are specifically paid to look after online forums.
its our osprey watchers from overseas who Will miss out. None of the footage was sold for someones own profit. Even the book that swt printed on behalf of the bloggers was just the bloggers own material. Its an excellent book but they've dropped it. It made thousands and would have done so still if they'd still ordered more copies. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that i can't go into.
some of the people who volunteered were ex staff who moderated the blog for a job just days before. They knew the rules. It would have worked.
I also moderate the blog that Peter ferns the loch manager set up in December when swt stopped things abruptly. Most of us made it over to the new blog because email addresses and phone numbers had been swapped but there as so many nest cam fans that are in limbo somewhere.