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