Technical Update

First, an update on the state of the cam. We’re not sure if our power problem is back, but our cam technician hopes to go out later today (after church) to check on the equipment. We have some time to troubleshoot the problem now that we’re still several weeks from any possible egg laying, but we need to figure out why our solar panel seems to be malfunctioning on random occasions. At some point we might have to order a new panel, although we had hoped to avoid that as they are rather expensive. Latest Update: We’ve got the cam running again, but we’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Immature Eagles

We had some excitement this past week when at least two different immature bald eagles spent some time on the Eagle Cam nest. We can’t be sure if either of the birds were former cam eaglets, but naturally we like to think that they might have been — and that is certainly a possibility.

The older bird (with the white coloring) appeared to be about 3 years old and the more brownish bird appeared to be about a year old. Immature bald eagles don’t reach breeding age until they’re about 4 to 5 years old, and that is when they exhibit a completely white head and tail.

To help you visualize how a brown bald eagle morphs into a white-headed bald eagle, here is a photo from our friend Woody Dawson showing an immature eagle that is about 3-1/2 years old. You can see from this beautiful photo that the juvenile is getting close to having a completely white head and tail — which are the surest signs of a mature bald eagle.

I wanted to point out one other set of photos from the recent Gallery update — in these photos we can see another example of bonding from our eagle couple. In the first shot you can see the one eagle is rubbing the back of the other eagle. This is another type of pre-nesting behavior that the couple uses to cement the bond that they will need over the next few months as they attempt to raise another generation of eaglets.

It might seem strange to think of birds bonding, but it’s important to remember that once the female produces the eggs, she will be relying on the male to be a strong defender of the nest and to be a good provider. She will also be relying on him to occasionally incubate the eggs so she can take a break. As for the male, he will be relying on the female to be a reliable mother and a loyal mate, and occasionally do her part to hunt for food and protect the nest from intruders. So the couple really are making a commitment to one another as they begin nesting season, and both of them will have to perform the duties of a responsible partner if they are to produce a healthy and viable family for the new year.

Interesting Photos

I have a couple interesting non-cam photos to share in this blog entry. First, Susan Feldhuhn — a cam watcher and volunteer with Tri-State Bird Rescue — alerted me to an amusing eagle story that was posted on Marie Winn’s blog. If you don’t already know, Marie Winn was the author of the famous hawk book Red-tails in Love: Pale Male’s Story - A True Wildlife Drama in Central Park [Note: if you haven’t read the book, run out and buy it tomorrow.]

Marie Winn’s blog often has interesting information about the birds in Central Park in New York City, but she also sometimes shares bird photos and stories that are sent to her from around the country. In this blog post, she shares a letter from a woman in California who was having issues with a local bald eagle nest. Read down to the bottom of the post to find out what the eaglets are doing in the photos that Marie has posted. Amazingly enough, the photos show fledglings from an Ohio nest that were actually using a backyard trampoline to practice their flapping. It’s really funny to think of the eaglets taking turns jumping up and down so they could improve their flapping skills.

In our next interesting photo, Aline — who is one of our cam watchers from Quebec, Canada — passed along this beautiful photo she took of the snow geese migration in her home area. Aline was kind enough to point out some other interesting tidbits about the photo. The mountain in the background is Mont-Sainte-Anne, which hosts a famous ski resort. And at the bottom of the mountain you can see a long building — this is Grosse Île (or Grosse Island) and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site of Canada.

This island served as a main port of arrival for immigrants to Canada and as a quarantine station for the Port of Quebec. And the Irish Memorial National Historic Site is a tribute to the importance that immigration has played in Canada’s history and is also a remembrance of the tragic experience that many Irish immigrants endured during the Great Irish Famine, which reached a climax in 1847. During that time, many immigrants fled Ireland due to the famine but then later died of typhus on Grosse Île, which then became the largest Irish famine burial ground located outside of Ireland. Thanks to Aline for sharing this insight into an important part of Canada’s history.

Nest Reminder

Just another reminder for those who are just joining us — based on the previous years of watching the Eagle Cam, we hope to see the first egg sometime around late January. Once the female begins laying eggs, we might see as many as three eggs total, but we’ll more likely see two. There is a small chance that we won’t see any eggs, as sometimes eagles go through the nesting preparations but don’t lay any eggs, or sometimes physical problems might prevent the female from producing eggs, but so far we’re feeling hopeful that we’ll see another batch of eaglets this year.

Thanks again for joining us for another season, and thanks for sending in your photos.

Until next time,
Lisa - webmaster
Contact

Tags:
eagles, wildlife refuge, eagle cam, Blackwater Refuge, Maryland

 

In our recent Gallery update we can see that our eagle parents are busy preparing the nest — or eyrie — for another season. Each year the eagle couple will add more sticks and grass material to their nest, and as a result, the eagles’ nest will grow very large and very heavy — sometimes weighing a ton or more.

As I mentioned on the cam page earlier, the eagles bring sticks to the nest, and these may be sticks that they’ve found or sticks that they’ve pulled off of trees with their talons. Our photographer friend Woody Dawson — who photographs eagles on the Susquehanna River — just sent me a photo showing one of his local eagles carrying a stick to the nest. Woody said that most of the sticks that he sees the eagles bringing are ones they’ve taken off of trees.

As for the nest location, our Eagle Cam nest is about 80 feet up in a loblolly pine tree, which is the preferred tree for nesting Chesapeake Bay bald eagles. The lofty tree reaches the northern end of its range on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and the eagles likely prefer this species because of the strength, height, and privacy that the trees offer them.

As you can see in the photo on the right — which shows one of our professional tree climbers approaching the cam nest — our eagles like to be up high, and this means that securing the cam over the nest is no easy feat. As our returning cam watchers know, each year we put the cam in place and cross our fingers that nothing will happen to it during the next few months. The most precarious time for the cam is right after the eggs have been laid because if the cam malfunctions then, we are stuck and cannot risk disturbing the eagles. At that point, we would have to wait until we were sure the chicks were about a month old before we could think of going up and repairing the cam. Fortunately in our last three seasons, the cam itself has not malfunctioned during this crucial time.

As far as eagle nests go, our cam nest is getting large, but it is not near record size. That honor goes to the massive, record-setting nest that was once in Vermilion, Ohio, near Lake Erie — a nest that was often referred to as simply “The Great Eyrie” (click on thumbnail photo).

Biologist Francis H. Herrick was the first person to study the amazing structure, which was built in 1890 and was twelve feet high, eight feet wide, and weighed almost two tons! In fact, the nest was so tall, it appeared to have multiple floors. The nest was in use until 1925 when it fell down during a storm, which scattered the newly laid eggs. Ten days later, the eagle parents started building a new eyrie only 431 feet away from where the old one had stood for so many years.

As this story illustrates, nests do sometimes fall, especially during storms. In fact a storm last year took down several eagle nests in and around Blackwater Refuge. But thus far, our Eagle Cam nest appears to be sturdy, and it does help that it is surrounded by other trees, which diminish the winds during a storm.

And speaking of storms and nests, check out this nest photo from the Oregon Eagle Cam at Deschutes National Forest. Good thing their nesting season hasn’t started yet. :-)

Technical Notes

In this blog entry, I wanted to briefly touch on some technical notes for our cam watchers. For those who missed the note I put on the cam page, if you are using AOL and you think you do not have the most current cam page, hold down your CTRL key and click the Refresh button in your browser toolbar; this will force AOL to get the newest page. This trick is sometimes necessary because AOL stores web pages on servers around the world, and sometimes they do not have the latest page.

Also, if you ever see a colored bar across the cam image, that normally means that something has temporarily interfered with our wireless signal. The bar will usually disappear in the next image.

Several cam watchers have asked about our cam refresh times. We will switch the cam refresh times once the Eagle Cam activity picks up (Eagle Cam at 30 seconds and Osprey Cam at 60 seconds). We have to alter the refresh times because we are limited in how many images we can send over our satellite dish each month. Note that this is not related to how many cam watchers we have or how long they watch — just how many individual images we send from our Refuge PC to our web host.

Finally on a non-technical note, one cam watcher asked if the eagles would ever nest in the Osprey Cam platform. The answer is “not likely” mainly because the platform is very shallow, not in a tree, and too close to the Wildlife Drive and human activity. During nesting season, our eagles prefer more privacy than our ospreys, so the eagles would not normally choose the platform over the many tall trees we have at the Refuge.

Mid-Winter Eagle Survey

One final topic — on January 10, 2008, Blackwater Refuge will be holding its Annual Mid-Winter Eagle Survey (rain date January 11). The survey includes an early morning non-roost count and an afternoon roost count. If you are interested in participating, check out our Mid-Winter Eagle Survey Schedule to learn more about this annual event that helps up keep tabs on the health of our local eagle population.

Until next time,
Lisa - webmaster
Contact

Tags:
eagles, wildlife refuge, eagle cam, eagle nest, Blackwater Refuge, Maryland

 

We want to welcome everyone to a new season with the Blackwater Refuge Eagle Cam!

For those who are new to our Eagle Cam, this is our fourth year with the eagles and their nest, which is 80 feet up in a loblolly pine tree at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge near Cambridge, Maryland.

The Friends of Blackwater run both the Osprey Cam and the Eagle Cam, as well as this website. The FOB is a nonprofit citizen support group that helps the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff carry out their educational, interpretive, and recreational missions at the Refuge. All of the Friends who work for the Refuge are unpaid volunteers, and we give our time because we believe in the Refuge System’s goal of protecting local wildlife and habitat.

Blackwater NWR is one of over 540 wildlife refuges in the National Wildlife Refuge System, which is the only group of federal lands where wildlife is supposed to come first. Blackwater Refuge is unique in that it hosts one of the largest breeding populations of bald eagles in the country.

Over the last three seasons, we’ve seen a total of seven eaglets hatch and fledge, so our cam nest has seen a good amount of previous success. If you’d like to learn more about our nesting eagles, be sure to check out our entertaining Eagle Watchers’ Guide (2.5 MB PDF file), which features highlights from our first year with the Eagle Cam.

Now that we are live for another season, cam watchers have been asking us about the eagle couple, which we’ve seen bonding on the Eagle Cam. Eagles are very loyal to their nests and will return year after year. If the nest falls down, they often rebuild the nest in the same tree or in a tree nearby. So based on this loyal behavior, we highly suspect that this couple is the same eagle pair from our previous cam seasons. If it is, then they are very experienced eagles that know what they’re doing when it comes to raising young.

Folks have also asked if this eagle pair is the same as the one on the Osprey Cam. We’re not really sure — the two nests are not that far apart (for a large flying bird) but there have been times when we’ve seen two eagles on the Osprey Cam and at the same time seen one or two eagles on the Eagle Cam, so in those instances, obviously they would not be the same couple. As for other times, we’re just not sure.

In the past, we’ve seen our first eagle egg around the end of January, so that is when we would expect to see one this year. Because our couple is experienced, the female often lays her eggs relatively early compared to other nests in the region.

After the first egg appears, an additional egg or two might arrive, with the eggs coming 2-3 days apart. Both parents will take turns incubating the eggs for about 32-36 days before they hatch, assuming the eggs are fertile.

If you’d like to learn more about Chesapeake Bay eagles, read our Eagle fact page. And if you’d like to learn more about our Eagle Cam, be sure to read the Eagle Cam Q&A, which provides some background information on our Eagle Cam operation.

And speaking of the cam’s operation, we have noticed that the Eagle Cam has occasionally been showing static. Our cam technician is working to fix that problem, so we appreciate your patience while we work to eliminate it.

We thank you for joining us for another season with our eagles. We hope this season goes as well as the previous three; if so, then we’re in for a lot of fun!

Unitl next time,
Lisa - webmaster
Contact

Tags:
eagles, wildlife refuge, eagle cam, Blackwater Refuge, Maryland