Recent eaglefamily portraits

SWFL eagles perching together and being very pretty.

 Mom Harriet with her big babies. (Bonus rainbow lensflare.)

Painting progress

Stripes are coming along nicely, mostly just the tail still left.

Also, I've come up with a name for her - she is Meripihka. Which is the Finnish word for amber, and sounds very pretty in my opinion. I could have just named her Amber, which is pretty, too, but the word in my first language came to mind first. Why any word for amber at all feels appropriate for her I'm sure has to do with her colouring, and amber and JP dinosaurs are quite closely connected, after all.

As for why the raptors would consider that a suitable identifier for her... well, she is a granddaughter of a raptor so adept at climbing trees he named himself after that, so perhaps it's something she's skilled at and fond of doing, too. Perhaps more often than Treeclimber, who might favor different types of trees, this leaves her with drops of resin adorning her claws and scales. Accidental the first few times - but, being the clever girl that she is, she realized the tree goo smell helps mask her scent from prey.

Amber and resin from a living tree are not the same thing, of course, as amber is specifically the fossilized version. But, the Finnish word directly translates as "sea resin", referring to the common place to find amber in Europe. I'm just gonna say the trees one gets stained in resin by climbing are found at the coast of the island, and we'll have the name make sense in the raptors' frame of reference. :D

Tl;dr: Meripihka gets her name from coming up with a new trick to help her at hunting that she discovered by liking to climb the smelly trees by the ocean.

Light tattoo

Two eaglets at the attic

The SWFL eaglets have both made it to the first branch of their nest tree that requires a bit of flying to reach. Warning for closeup of a dead fish in the second to last image of the post.

 E16 left/front, E15 right/back. (Other way around when seen on camera 2 below)

Raptor mani-pedi

Starting the Battle Damage raptor's makeover with painting her claws dark purple. I think it works as a nice contrast to the yellow.

The weather has been really hot and I haven't felt like painting much, just bringing out and putting away the supplies feels like a workout, lol. But my laptop ran out of charge during a thunderstorm, and that was as good an excuse as any to do artsy things not involving a computer for a change.

E15 has fledged!

Or fludged, as leaving the nest tree didn't seem to be the plan just yet, but E15 did great regardless. The fledging happened yesterday, and today E15 is 11 weeks old.
(Link to nestcam)

The big moment. You can find Lady Hawk's video of the fledging here, and in this post are screenshots I took from the livestream on three of the nest's cameras.

Attic exploring with eaglets

Exciting SWFL eagle news: E15 has made it to the attic branch!

E16 standing below, occasionally flapping their wings, too. Both are pretty good at hovering already.