Successes and tribulations of the new African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) blog, including new leopard camera photos from South Africa, remind me of our experience planning, installing, and operating the innovative QuetzalCam in the cloud forests of Costa Rica way back in 1999.

That early remote-wildlife-cam project, which Forum One implemented with the World Bank and the Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica in effort to help publicize the MesoAmerican Biological Corridor, yielded wonderful photographs and scientific data that seem to resonate with the AWF experience today:

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  Technology is not the hard part; politics, permissions, and unpredictable animals are! AWF camera abusers include elephants and rhinos. Our vandals were monkeys and a very mean weasel .
  
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  To keep web users engaged, it is important to construct a story-line around the image feeds. AWF does this powerfully with their blog. Back in the pre-blog days, we did something similar by having field researchers post updates and educational information. These were some of the most visited pages on the site, as people would come to look at the most recent photos, then flip into the educational and interpretive information to learn more.
  
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  Viewers want to participate in the story, not just see the photos, and are willing to reward their involvement with support. (Thanks to a kindly AWF donor for replacing one camera taken out by an elephant.)
  
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  The images are powerful for science and fun. Scientists manage AWF's leopard work, and our Quetzal cameras captured thousands of images used by researchers.
  

Read the AWF blog to track the daily action in Africa, including trials, tribulations, and images from the wildlife research cameras.