Life streams Webcams of the natural world provide solace and connection

In 2012, Dianne Hoffman, a retired consultant, became a peeping Tom. For five hours a day she watched the antics of a couple, Harriet and Ozzie, who lived on Dunrovin ranch in Montana.

- Phoebe Weston

The pair were nesting ospreys, being streamed live as they incubated their clutch of eggs. The eggs never hatched, but the ospreys sat on them for months before finally kicking them out of the nest.

"I do think they experienced grief," says Hoffman, now 81, who watched the birds for five hours a day from 2,000 miles away in Pennsylvania.

Hoffman was processing her own grief after the loss of her husband, brother and father. Watching the live streams was how she "rejoined the world".

"It was a very black time," she said. Although Ozzie died in 2014, she still watches the nest and its current occupants for an hour a day. "I can't think of anything the internet has done better for me than these cams."

Nature-focused live streams, set up near nests, water holes, dens or landscapes to provide a live, constant feed of the natural world, have proliferated over the past two decades, helped by cheap cameras and remote internet connections. The drama of nature - even sometimes the lack of it - is what draws people in.

The seventh season of the TV series The Great Moose Migration from the Swedish broadcaster SVT involved 20 days of continuous live footage, drawing in millions of viewers. Norway's NRK has aired 18 hours of salmon swimming upstream and 12 hours of firewood burning. A viral fish "doorbell" camera allows viewers to watch and check migrating fish in a lock in Utrecht.