(1st chick: 15 days old; 2nd chick: 14 days old)

We’re starting to see some changes in the family. First, the chicks are getting noticeably bigger, and they’re starting to spend more time sitting at their mother’s chest rather than under her — a sign that they’re more capable of keeping themselves warm. We also saw a few photos where the chicks were moving around the nest a good bit and not just staying stuck in the nest cup.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll see the eaglets get more adventurous about moving around their home, and we might even see them peeking over the edges of the nest to the ground below. This always makes our cam watchers very nervous, but the eaglets have enough sense of fear to know that they shouldn’t jump out of the nest or go crawling over the edge. I should point out that when the eaglets are skirting the edges, the eagle parents seem to be very aware of where their children are — if you look in the photo I posted, you see the mother eagle hovering nearby in case the eaglets get too curious about what’s over the edge. And we have seen photos of a parent herding a curious eaglet back to the middle of the nest after it was too close to the edge.

The next visible sign of development that we’ll be looking for on the eaglets’ bodies is their second coat of down. The eaglets come out of the shell with a covering of light-colored gray down, but after several weeks of age, they develop a darker, heavier, woolier coat of down, which is their last coat of down before their feathers appear. This photo offers a good example of the darker second coat. In this shot you can also see the big yellow feet that will become more noticeable on our cam image as the eaglets continue to grow.

A couple weeks after the dark, wooly down has developed, the feathers will slowly start to emerge — in fact if you look closely at the photo I posted above, you can see several feather shafts starting to appear on the right wing of the eaglet. These “blood feathers” are protected by a shaft and fed by blood until the feathers are fully formed. Once the feathers are fully out, they will appear as dark sections on the eaglet’s body, with the feathers growing more rapidly on the shoulders, back and the wings.

At around four to six weeks of age, the eaglet may be sporting bits of the first two downy stages as well as new feathers. Often the head of the eaglet is the last place where the light-gray down disappears, so the eaglet can look rather funny with light-colored fluff on its head, dark gray on its body, and blackish feathers just starting to come in. In this photo you can see an example of eaglets sporting all three coverings at the same time. But eventually, all the down will disappear from view and the eaglet will develop its first set of juvenile feathers, which will be mostly dark brown with some white patches. We’ll talk more about the all-important eagle feathers in a future entry.

Our Improving Father

As our cam watchers know, we’ve been waiting for our eagle father to get into gear with his fishing now that he has a growing family, and I think that event might have occurred. We’ve started seeing more fish in the nest as of late, and the chicks seem to be getting more regular meals. And the other day, we noticed a male eagle had just brought a freshly caught fish to the osprey platform, and we wondered if it was our eagle father from the Eagle Cam, and if so, would he bother to bring the meal home to his family. Sure enough, after eating some of the head (a common behavior for eagle fathers), the male eagle delivered the fish to his family at the Eagle Cam. And if this wasn’t impressive enough, we’ve also caught a couple occasions where he’s been helping the mother feed the eaglets.

So right now we’re pleased with how our eagle father is stepping up and doing his part to help the family and not putting so much of the fishing/hunting duties on the mother.

Technical Question

I’ve been getting a few emails asking us if the Blackwater Eagle Cam will ever go to streaming video, so I wanted to provide an answer here. The Blackwater cams get a lot of traffic, which we are always proud of, but it would be very expensive for us to offer streaming video on our site with our traffic load. Some websites take on corporate sponsors or get a commercial entity to host and run the cam to help pay for the costs. Also, some cams limit the number of people who can view the cam or limit how long they can watch in order to keep the cost of streaming down. This is something the Friends of Blackwater have chosen not to do. We prefer to make our cams non-commercial and open to anyone who wants to watch them — for as long as they want to watch them. So at this time, we do not have plans to go to streaming video.

I also wanted to point out that we keep the refresh times on the Eagle Cam and Osprey Cam at the times you see because we are limited in how many images we can upload using our satellite dish. Our dish provider will turn us off if we exceed a certain limit each month, so that is why we keep one cam at 30 seconds and the other at 45 or 60 seconds. I should point out that this has nothing to do with how many people are watching — it has to do with how many unique images we send from the field up to our website each minute.

Other Eagle News

A big congratulations to the folks at the NCTC Eagle Cam in West Virginia. They now have three healthy eaglets and a father that appears to be more than up to the challenge of feeding such a large family.

Also, we heard some good news from the Norfolk Eagle Cam — the eagle pair there have started laying a second clutch after the intruder female caused them to abandon their previous clutch.

If you have some time, be sure to also check out the eaglets at the Florida Eagle Cam — these birds are getting very big and are starting to exercise their wings. This will give you an idea as to what our birds will look like in a couple of months.

Osprey Cam

We haven’t seen another sighting of an osprey on the platform since last week, so we suspect the osprey we did see might have just been a visitor. Right now ospreys are moving up the East Coast to places as far north as New England and Canada, so some ospreys we see at Blackwater will nest here, and some are just stopping to rest and feed before they head farther north. In case you missed my posting on the cam page, be sure to check out Bob Quinn’s new photos — he provides a lot of great shots showing ospreys playing around the Refuge.

I should also point out the eagle you see at the end of Bob’s photos on that page — Bob said that eagle flew from the trees to the platform after it got a little nervous about Bob being around. There is a possibility that is our Eagle Cam father because we know he likes to perch on the Osprey Cam nest when no ospreys are around.

Special Treat

Finally, I wanted to offer some Alaskan eagle photos as a special treat. These were loaned to me by photographer Frank Severance, and he took these amazing shots in Haines, Alaska. In the first shot we see an adult and an immature bald eagle sitting in a tree together. In the second shot, we see an adult bald eagle snatching a fish out of the water. And in the final shot, we see a wild looking battle between an aggressive immature bald eagle and an adult. Much thanks to Frank for sharing these wonderful photos. Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.

Until next time,
Lisa - webmaster
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eagles, wildlife refuge, eagle cam, eaglets, Blackwater Refuge, Maryland

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 7:22 am and is filed under Chicks, Immature Eagles, Eagle Cam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.