March 06, 2007
Eaglet Videos
We appreciate everyone's patience as the Eagle Cam went down briefly yesterday evening. Our volunteer cam technician, Tom Hook, was quick on the job and had us back up early this morning. Much thanks to Tom for his speedy work to get the Eagle Cam operating again.
Also, I wanted to remind our new cam watchers that if they have missed any of our previous web log entries, they can look in the right margin of this page, and find links to past entries. For example, if you look at the one called "Eagle Cam Video" you can see video clips from when our parents were incubating the eggs.
In this web log entry, we’re offering five video clips of our two new eaglets. These clips were captured from our Visitor Center TV monitor on Sunday, which was a sunny but cool and windy day at the Refuge.
Normally when I post videos, I try to keep the file sizes small since I know that some of our cam watchers are still using a dial-up connection to the Internet. But I felt the need to offer larger clips this time since the eaglets are so small and sometimes hard to see. So what you’ll find below are two versions of each clip – a low bandwidth version and a high bandwidth version. The scenes are the same in each clip, but the high bandwidth version has a bigger file size and a clearer view.
Just right-click on each link below and choose “Save Target As” or “Save Link As” to download the clip to your computer.
In the first video clip we see the father eagle sitting on the chicks. We continue to be impressed with our father eagle’s willingness to watch the chicks and to even feed them (which he did just the other day). Not long after this clip starts, the mother eagle flies in and the father stands up and flies off, leaving the mother to look after the chicks. Once the father leaves, we can see the chicks in the nest cup, with the youngest on the left and the oldest on the right.
You’ll notice that both chicks are still wobbly and often fall down or have trouble keeping their heads up at times. But it’s clear that the oldest is stronger than the youngest at this stage.
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| 11 MB Clip | 5 MB Clip |
In the second clip we see the beginning of a feeding session. Apparently the mother eagle had a small bird when she flew into the nest. We never actually see the bird, but the mother eagle begins plucking something and feathers begin to fly, so she must have had a feathered meal. As mom plucks away, the two chicks sit there patiently waiting while feathers drift about their heads, then mom hands a small piece of food to the youngest eaglet, who proceeds to drop it. The mother quickly picks it up and offers it again to the chicks.
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| 13 MB Clip | 5 MB Clip |
In video clip three, we see a different feeding session later that morning. This time the food is a large fish that the father eagle brought to the nest after the previous clip. In the video you can see the technique that the parents use to feed the young. First the female eagle tears off a piece and offers it to one or the other chick -- often depending on which bird has their head up at the time. If the eaglet doesn’t seem interested in a piece, she offers it to the other, and if neither takes it, she might eat part of it herself. Sometimes she also adjusts the morsel in her mouth if it appears that the offered piece is too big for the eaglets to take.
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| 13 MB Clip | 5 MB Clip |
In the fourth clip we see a clear example of sibling rivalry. At the beginning of the shot, the youngest eaglet makes a pecking motion toward the oldest (the eaglet may have just fallen forward) and the oldest eaglet reacts by pecking and twisting the youngest on the head. After the peck, the youngest eaglet wisely keeps its head down for a bit, until the coast is clear for it to raise its head again.
Normally parents do not interfere with sibling rivalry attacks, but the peck by the oldest seemed to attract the mother’s attention in this clip and she moves over the chicks.
The lesson the oldest is trying to teach the youngest is that the smaller bird should be submissive around the oldest. Last year our youngest chick (in a two-eaglet brood) had been pecked so many times by its older sibling that we could see a little bald spot developing on the top of its head. In comparison, our youngest from the previous season (in a three-eaglet brood) showed almost no signs of having been harassed excessively by either of its bigger siblings.
Fortunately, this bullying does dissipate over time. Once the eaglets get closer to fledging age, the two siblings will be more like playmates than competitors. They’ll still squabble over food, but we won’t likely see the same bullying that goes on when they are very young.
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| 16 MB Clip | 5 MB Clip |
In the final clip, we see the feeding session has ended and the mother eagle is once again positioning herself over the chicks. The interesting part of this clip is how the mother eagle herds the chicks under her and manages to position them close against her brood patch without smothering them. We must assume that there is a small pocket of air under the mother so the chicks can breathe while she sits on top of them. Once the mother is settled in, she begins the wait until the father returns or until the chicks get hungry again.
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| 12 MB Clip | 5 MB Clip |
We hope you enjoy these video clips. We know a lot of our cam watchers wish we had streaming video, but since that is something we cannot afford, we offer these clips with the hope that they will give you similar insight into how our family looks in motion.
Thanks to all those who have been sending in their photos to our Eagle Cam Gallery – we have a wonderful record now of each eaglet’s birth, and we look forward to capturing the rest of their young nest lives with new images.
Until next time,
Lisa - webmaster
(contact)