WHEN Kim Peachey set up a webcam in her backyard she never imagined her house would become an Internet phenomenon, but that is exactly what has happened.
More than 38,500 people have logged onto her website, LIVE VIDEO:www.backyardgalahcam.com.auwhich has brought the age-old hobby of bird watching into the 21st century.
Ms Peachey lives about 10km west of Goulburn and uses her webcam to capture real time images of the areas wild birds and stream them live to her thousands of fans on the Internet.
Each day her camera transmits images of galahs, cockatoos, rosellas and magpies and the world can’t get enough of it.
“People love it,” Ms Peachey said.
“We have people in the United States, Norway, Germany, Russia, Iran, Canada and they have never seen these types of birds because they don’t have them over there.”
The Goulburn webcam is unique and has been so popular it has been picked up by LIVE VIDEO:earthcam.com,
the world’s largest and most respected live geographical video-streaming site.
In fact it was so popular on one week it received 10,000 hits. Since it has been on earthcam.com it has received 20,000 hits and growing rapidly, putting it into the prestigious category of Earth Cam Top Cameras and making it one of the most watched nature cams in the world!
Ms Peachey said the success of her site illustrated just how much we all take what we have for granted and how lucky we are to live in a country as beautiful as Australia.
Despite becoming a global hit, the Backyard Galah Cam project had very humble beginnings.
“It all started off as a hobby,” Ms Peachey explained.
“About three or four years ago I started watching a webcam in Gaylord, Northern Michigan (USA) and I just wanted to share the birds in my world and show them to the rest of the world.”
In May of this year she decided to make her dream a reality. She strung up some feeders, set up the webcam in her garden and started live streaming onto ustream.com.
However, it wasn’t long before two friends she met on LIVE VIDEO: snowmancam. the website that had the camera in Northern Michigan, offered to build her website.
With the help of American Tom Gorman and British teen Rick Mallory she built her site and the rest is history.
Ms Peachey is extremely proud of her achievements and while she does want to grow the site she said it was important to keep things in perspective and not get carried away.
“You can’t get ahead of yourself. You just need to let it go and do things as they need to be done,” she said.
Last week the site began streaming in High Definition.
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