(1st chick: 20 days old; 2nd chick: 19 days old)

Well, after singing the praises of our father eagle in the last post, the male has slipped into his erratic food delivery schedule again, and consequently food has not been abundant in the nest. After a couple days of not seeing any new meals brought in, the mother produced a decent-sized bird, only to have the father bring in this small contribution. We’re not sure where he finds such tiny fish, but it actually looked smaller than the eaglets.

We did see a good-sized fish brought in early Sunday morning, and we’re not sure who brought it, but since the father eagle appeared in the image, we’ll be optimistic and pretend dad brought it. :-)

The lack of food is putting some stress on the younger eaglet, as we’re seeing submissive behavior from the younger chick and some bullying behavior by the older eaglet, who is doing what all older eaglets do when food is short — making sure it gets the most food.

We’ve seen images where the younger chick appears submissive during meal time — such as staying down and in the back while the parent is feeding. Also we’ve seen the familiar submissive posture where the younger eaglet puts its head down and away from the older chick, usually as a result of pecking from the elder eaglet.

These are normal behaviors in a nest where the food is light and the two chicks are playing the game of “every eaglet for itself,” but we had hoped to see less of this since Blackwater appears to have enough food for a two-eaglet family.

Several cam watchers have asked if the eaglets could feed themselves. While we have seen shots showing what looked like eaglets pecking at the food, it’s not likely they can tear off meat at this stage. Duck and fish can be very tough to tear apart, and the eaglets need to be bigger and stronger before they can tear off meat for themselves. Once the eaglets are bigger, we’ll see the parents just drop food into the nest and let the eaglets “go at it,” but at this stage in their lives, they need a parent to do a lot of the tearing for them.

We did see one exciting thing this past week, and that was an eaglet clearly flapping its wings. We’ll see more of this activity in the weeks to come, but it’s good to see the eaglets beginning to exercise their wings in preparation for the day when they become mighty fliers like their parents.

Speaking of the eaglets, you might have noticed I’ve tried to avoid calling either of them “him” or “her” because we aren’t sure about their sex just yet. While it is true that female bald eagles are larger than the males, at this age in an eaglet’s life, size is related more to order of birth, so we can’t really guess the gender of our eaglets at this point. However, when they are older — around the time they get ready to fledge — we should be able to guess their gender by their comparative size.

Last year, our two eaglets — Justice and Majesty — exhibited this difference, as you can see in the image to the right. Justice, on the left, was definitely larger and appeared to be a female, and Majesty appeared to be a male.

As for our eaglets this year, we can speculate that the first chick might be a female. The reason for this is in the book The Bald Eagle: Haunts and Habits of a Wilderness Monarch, Canadian eagle biologist Dr. Gary Bortolotti offers evidence of a sex bias based on observations that he collected while studying 37 eaglet broods around Besnard Lake in Saskatchewan, Canada. He reports, “Even though there was an overall nestling sex ratio of one to one, the order in which the sexes hatched was not random; 63% of first-hatched eggs were females, and 68% of second-hatched eggs were males. A sex bias in hatching sequence has only recently been discovered in birds.” The reasoning they offered for this was that because male eaglets develop faster in the nest, having the female born first would reduce the competitive advantage of the faster-growing male.

So we’ll be keeping an eye on our eaglets’ growth, and after they develop their feathers we’ll likely have a better idea as to their gender.

Also, now that we have chicks, several cam watchers have asked if we will hold our annual Eaglet Naming Contest this year. The answer is yes, and we’ll be announcing the start of that when the eaglets get a little bigger. For those who are new to our website, normally we allow folks to enter a name for each eaglet, then judges pick the winners, and the winners get a prize from our Refuge gift store, as well as get recognized on our website.

Speaking of the contest, it just occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve mentioned WildCam.com this season. For those who are new to our cams, we have a partner in WildCam.com, which is based in Africa. We share our Eagle and Osprey Cam feeds with them, so if you ever have a problem accessing the Friends of Blackwater website, check out WildCam.com to find our cams there as well. You have to register, but it’s free, and they won’t share your email address with anyone.

Once the Eaglet Naming Contest begins, it will be hosted on the WildCam.com site, although we’ll obviously publicize it here and give folks instructions for entering their names at WildCam. So stay tuned for more info on the contest.

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

 

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

 

(1st chick: 10 days old; 2nd chick: 9 days old)

A few items to discuss, so I thought I’d do another blog update.

First, I know folks have been worried about the long time the parents have been off the chicks. We did have mild weather yesterday and the sun was out, so we gather the mother eagle thought she could be off them more. We need to remember the mother has been largely responsible for the chicks, and she needs to feed herself because there hasn’t been a lot of food in the nest, so it’s possible she spent time doing that yesterday. We don’t know if the father was around (out of our view) watching the eaglets, but we hope so. I did see a parent on the nest this morning feeding the chicks twice with what looked like a new fish, so that was good to see.

I also know some folks think we’ve been too hard on our eagle father, but yesterday the NCTC Eagle Cam in West Virginia got their first eaglet, and look what was waiting in the nest for this tiny bird. This is the quantity of food that has greeted our eaglets in past seasons at our Blackwater Eagle Cam. In fact, as soon as an eaglet appeared, our previous father went fishing or hunting, sometimes having two fish or a fish and a duck in the nest together. So we naturally expected this type of behavior from our current father.

I think one of our cam watchers summed it up best the other day when she labeled our eaglets “The Hardy Chicks.” They’ve had to make do with the food available and they’ve also been on their own quite a bit. But they seem to be hanging in there and growing, so they are indeed “hardy” little raptors.

One final note about the eaglets — several folks have asked about their current size. At birth, bald eaglets are about 4-5 inches, and since they are now approaching two weeks old and have obviously grown some, I can speculate they’re pushing about 6 inches, but that’s just an educated guess.

Osprey Return

We did get to see our first osprey on the nest on Thursday! The bird (possibly a female) was around for a little while, but then an eagle appeared on the nest late in the afternoon; this possibly means no osprey is yet claiming the nest as their own, because when that happens, the eagles usually leave for good. While eagles might steal an osprey’s fish, they don’t seem to be willing to challenge the nesting ospreys for their home at the cam platform.

It’s possible our female has returned and she’s just waiting for her partner to show, so we’ll be keeping an eye out for a shot showing two ospreys on the nest together. And for those who are new to observing ospreys — or fish hawks — it is a bit easier to discern the sex of the individual birds. Osprey males often have a white chest, while females often have a “necklace” or brown coloring on their chests. Here you can see a clear example of a female with a noticeable necklace, although I should point out that sometimes females have a very faint necklace that is hard to see from a distance. Also, just like eagles, osprey females are bigger than the males.

We hear the commercial bucket truck is scheduled to come out Friday to adjust our cam, but again, if the truck operator has any kind of delay in his schedule, we might have to put off the visit. They are calling for a slight chance of rain Friday afternoon, and again, that would prevent the bucket truck from going up high into the air to service the pole. Whenever we have to arrange for the bucket truck, it’s a tricky affair because we have to coordinate schedules and gamble with the weather. It’s part of the reason why we don’t like having to get the truck out to the nest.

105th Anniversary of the National Wildlife Refuge System

I wanted to point out that today is a special day for wildlife refuge fans. Today marks the 105th Anniversary of the National Wildlife Refuge System — the only collection of federal lands in America where wildlife is supposed to come first. Blackwater NWR is one of the units in the Refuge System, having been formed back in 1933. This year is also the 75th Anniversary for Blackwater, and we’ll be honoring that event at our Eagle Festival on Saturday, March 15. All are welcome to join us that day.

The Refuge System was formed by President Teddy Roosevelt, when on March 14, 1903, he signed an executive order establishing Pelican Island (in Florida) as the first federal bird reservation. He went on to create a network of 55 bird reservation and national game preserves for wildlife, and these lands eventually became the National Wildlife Refuge System, which today includes 548 national wildlife refuges and 37 Wetland Management Districts (altogether equaling about 97 million acres), which is supported by over 200 Refuge Friends groups, like the Friends of Blackwater, who run the Blackwater cams that you enjoy. Each year the Refuge System hosts about 39 million visitors, who help contribute approximately $1.7 billion to local economies across America.

I’d like to end this web log entry with some words from Teddy Roosevelt — words which remind us why he is considered the greatest conservationist president America was lucky enough to have:

“We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.”

“I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”

“Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.”

“Spring would not be spring without bird songs, any more than it would be spring without buds and flowers, and I only wish that besides protecting the songsters, the birds of the grove, the orchard, the garden and the meadow, we could also protect the birds of the sea-shore and of the wilderness.”

“Short-sighted men, in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things.”

Until next time,
Lisa - webmaster
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Tags:
eagles, wildlife refuge, eagle cam, Blackwater Refuge, Pelican Island, Teddy Roosevelt, National Wildlife Refuge System