Three Bald eagle clutches and a beginning Red-tailed hawk one

Warning that the post includes views of prey in the nests.

First some peeks at Jackie and Shadow's eaglet at the Big Bear nest from yesterday. The little one will be two weeks old this thursday.

Jackie feeding the chick. There is currently a naming contest underway, so the chick will eventually be called something other than chick, too.

The inviable second egg remains in the nest, but it may get buried after a while as new nest material piles up and gets moved around, and the parents give up on incubating it. Since the chick still needs constant brooding, the egg gets brooded, too, and is too small to be in the way.

Crawling out from under mom for a bit.

Little wings flapping to keep balance.

A stylish over-the-shoulder posing for a closeup.

 

At the Southwest Florida nest, the two eaglets are today both 11 weeks old, and continue their exploration of the nest tree outside the nest. Here are both siblings perching on the veranda branch, E20 left and E19 right. So far they've stuck to this closest branch, but their hovers when wingercising have been impressive enough it won't be long now that they make it to the higher branches, too.

Also some zoomings at 10-week-old E19 that I didn't post a week ago.

And some screenshots from another Bald eagle nest I've checked in on occasionally, the West End nest at Catalina Island, California. Not very far from the Big Bear nest.

The West End nest (which, as seen in this screenshot, is on the ground, with no suitable nest trees available in the territory) has had my attention for a few reasons. One is that it's one of the nests where a trio rather than duo of Bald eagles has been observed to be nesting together, a trio consisting of one male and two females in this case. They're not the nest's current occupants, but they nested together for several seasons.

The current resident pair are Thunder, a 13-year-old female, who is actually the old trio's granddaughter (on the right, and at the nest in the first screenshot); and Akecheta, a 6-year-old male (brooding chicks on the left in the second screenshot).

I watched their first season together in 2020, though I didn't take screenshots, and while interesting to observe, it didn't quite go to plan for the birds. If Shadow at Big Bear was a young not quite 5-year-old (Bald eagles reach sexual maturity at 4-5 years old) when he had his first clutch, Akecheta was a barely 4-year-old subadult, who had figured things out as far as acquiring a mate, but when Thunder laid eggs, he didn't seem to know at all what to do with them. Instead of incubating and guarding them, he preferred to follow Thunder whenever she tried to leave him in charge of the nest. Predictably, the clutch failed. He did much better the following year, now an actual adult with nesting instincts fully kicked in, but sadly their eggs still fell prey to ravens. This year, they finally have hatchlings, and it's not one, not two, but three of them!

 

Thunder with the chicks. Youngest chick paying attention to the feeding, two older siblings more interested in wrestling each other in the back row. The chicks hatched 8th, 10th, and 12th of March, so the youngest is two days old here.

Young dad Akecheta brooding his babies.

Thunder and Akecheta are both from monitored nests in the area, and have leg bands (Thunder only on left leg, and Akecheta on both legs), though probably the easiest identifier to tell them apart is that Akecheta has his ID number 61 on his wings, attached as a nestling in a way that doesn't impede normal movement, as part of the conservation program of restoring a Bald eagle population to the region (the full ID is A-61, but the A is small and easily covered by feathers).

And now that he has figured parenthood out, look at you, first-time dad, feeding chicks! While I have seen several especially Bald eagle males know how to tear prey into small pieces and gently feed those to their chicks, it's still primarily the female's job, and can take some practice to get right, so I'm used to expecting it from experienced raptor dads when this behavior is exhibited by raptor dads at all. Akecheta is a little clumsy about it still, but he's got the right idea, and what matters is he got some food in the chicks. Good job!

And last but not the least, the Cornell Red-tailed hawks Big Red and Arthur, whose nesting I followed last year, have started their clutch for this season, with Big Red having laid the first egg yesterday. Looking forward to seeing little baby buzzards, too!