Free Range Photography

In an effort to beat the heat and the poor light that comes with it I arrived at the Benbow Bald Eagle nest watching spot at 6:20 this morning, hoping to get some good looks at the juvenile. The young eagle had other ideas, however, as it never moved, sleeping in, deep in the nest bowl until well after 7. It was a quiet morning with a beautiful sky, so I patiently waited.

Once the youngster got up, there was a fair amount of activity: stretching, preening, taking a poop off the edge of the nest, and some pretty serious wing flapping and jumping practice that has advanced to the point of short hovers in the air above the nest.

I’m guessing the bird is about 11 weeks now. Obviously healthy and growing, it was still a mystery that I have never seen a food delivery to this nest. In past years, we could count on one or two drops by the adults every morning even after the young one could feed itself.

But that was about to change. After the eaglet had been up for about an hour, crying intermittently, I noticed the pitch of the cries suddenly becoming more intense. The eaglet shuffled to the edge of the nest and leaned over, continuing to cry urgently. I realized a parent was arriving as it appeared at the right edge of my camera’s frame and landed in the nest.

By the time a juvenile eagle is almost full grown, delivered food is grabbed savagely from the incoming provider and quickly tucked under the bird’s belly while wings are spread out over the prize. This is called mantling and is done by birds of prey after a catch to hide and protect it from competitors and thieves.

Because the view into the nest is so obscured, I couldn’t make out what the prey was, but I recognized the youngster’s aggression and after a bit of a kerfuffle, the parent hopped out of the nest and onto a branch behind before finally flying off to a perch 20 yards away in a tree upstream.

The adult flew off after a few minutes and then an hour or so later returned with yet another meal. (It could have been the other parent, I have no way of knowing.) The same thing happened when the adult landed in the nest, the juvenile was again ruthless making its claim.

This time, the meal was consumed in an area of the nest I could see, and the last clip in the video below shows how efficient the young bird has become at feeding itself. It doesn’t seem that long ago that it was being tenderly offered tiny morsels by a doting parent. Over the next couple weeks it will take flight for the first time.