A brief bit of History how this camera came to be. The original idea is credited to Gordon Kiyokawa our Golf Course Superintendent about 2024 who asked about the possibility of doing this. Some casual discussions happened that year as to how this could be implemented and when so that the eagles would not be disturbed.
Emails queries were sent to the technical contact at Big Bear Valley (https://friendsofbigbearvalley.org/eagles/) as they have had a couple cameras live for several years. The questions were really which camera they were using, connectivity & traffic volume. They run their camera with solar power and a large battery grid which has it's own set of challenges.
The situation at Royal Oaks was not as complex as there was power at the base of the trees where the nest is located and we have network connectivity at a nearby building already. We were able to install a waterproof enclosure at the base adjacent to an irrigation station along with a wireless radio to the near by building.
The key piece of this project was install the camera in the tree while the Eagles were gone, they typically leave in approximately July and return in December/January. Some drone flights were conducted in the fall of 2025 while they were away to decide placement and know more precisely where the nest was located. The camera was ultimately placed in an adjacent tree that the camera has direct line of sight to the nest.
The equipment arrived in approximately October 2025 and the configuration of the camera, network equipment, was completed over a few evenings along with some testing. Once the waterproof enclosure was installed by the Royal Oaks crew the network equipment was installed and activated on the larger Royal Oaks Network.
The camera was installed by an arborist in mid-December 2025 and once it was live work began on building the website and getting the live stream active. The live stream went active on YouTube on January 12th, 2026 following some technical changes to the camera and associated network changes.
At 16:42 on 1/12/2026 an eagle was seen for the first time on the live stream, within seconds a second one appeared. They were building the nest it appeared, while they had been spotted days before this from the ground it was not until this time they appeared on the camera. To say we were excited would be to put it mildly.
For the technical folks that may have an interest in how we did this.
Camera: AXIS P5655-E PTZ Dome Network Camera
Network: UniFi US-8-150W
Wireless link: Ubiquiti Nanostation M5 to a nearby building
The Axis camera allows for a stream direct to YouTube live
We also are at this point streaming to a DVR as well in our Clubhouse to hopefully capture some really cool videos of our Eagle friends.