On Tuesday I hiked to the farthest Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) nest at Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, hoping to determine if there were any eaglets in the nest. During most of the year you can walk past this nest as part of a big loop, but the road is now blocked to protect the eagles, so you have to double back along the trail (a distance of almost two miles (3.2 km) to return to the parking lot.
This eagle nest is in a sycamore tree. Several years ago, one of the limbs gave way and during the off-season almost half of the nest slid to the ground. The eagles have done some repairs each year, but the nest is still relatively small. At this time of the year, there is a good deal of new foliage, so it is a bit difficult to see what is going on in the nest.
When I arrived at the nest, I noticed that one of the adults was sitting completely upright, which was a good sign. When the eagles are incubating the eggs, the tend to hunker down in the nest, with only their heads visible.
As I watched and waited, the adult eagle flew to some higher branches in the tree. My flow of adrenaline and sense of anticipation increased as I waited to see if an eaglet would appear. I was double delighted when two little heads popped up. The eaglet on the left seemed to be a bit bigger than its sibling and was probably the older of the two. In the second image, the bigger eaglet is looking upwards toward the branch where the adult was perched.
I was a long way off when I took these photos with my telephoto zoom lens, so they are not super quality images, but they provide proof that there are at least two little eaglets in this nest. As I noted in an earlier post, there is one eaglet in another nest on the refuge. The third active eagle nest is so large and high up in the trees that it is not yet possible to tell if there are any eagle babies in it—any eaglets will probably have to grow stronger and larger before the climb up to the the edge of that nest.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 