Researchers have aerial footage of a penguin colony taken by none other than a caracara (a bird of prey) that thought it was stealing an egg. If you haven't seen this, you have to check it out.
(This is the work of John Downer Productions, one of a series of films made by placing cameras in the midst of a group of animals to record footage of behaviors we don't typically observe.)
Impressive, no?
Footage like this reminds me how much I loved studying animals--of the incredible, unexpected things they sometimes do.
Of course, it also reminds me that in order to get this footage, someone had to spend countless hours sitting in a hide not far from the rookery. Creature comforts tend to be lacking, back muscles spasm, and a game of canasta (or any other activity that involves other people) beckons like the golden light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. But then, for a scientist or photographer out to capture something incredible, that's just part of the daily grind.
Sometimes, something happens to make all the waiting worthwhile.
Yeah, the 'egg camera' idea is novel, but I'm not sure how much you could tell from that footage if you didn't at least have other cameras to observe it from a distance, between the tumbling and the fact that the lens is often on the side you don't care about. Maybe they need to make EggCamera 2.0 with lenses pointing in 4 or 6 directions next. :D
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