Eaglet at Iroquois refuge dies

Other eaglet seems healthy with one more to hatch

Image taken from Pixcams: This picture shows a bald eagle feeding a freshly caught fish to the remaining chick. A livestream of the bald eagle nest has seen a nig increase in traffic in the past week, including 144,000 views on Facebook.

Press Release, Friends of Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge

BASOM – One of the eaglets being watched by a camera at Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge has died, the refuge Friends group announced today.

“It’s so easy and natural to develop parental instincts for these chicks if you watch them for any length of time,” said Richard Moss, president of the Iroquois Friends group. “That makes a development like this hard to process. It’s a difficult lesson that observing nature is not a place for sentiment.”

The eaglet was knocked out of the nest bole proper by its mother’s foot on Monday morning and never made it back to get warm. The chick’s thermoregulation had not developed enough yet to allow it to survive outside the bole.

The six-day-old chick, the first eaglet to hatch, appeared healthy before the incident, was the largest and had been getting the most food.

The adults seemed largely oblivious that anything was amiss, despite the eaglet still being in the larger part of the nest and very close to the bole.

“This is quite rare,” said Emma DeLeon, vice president of the Friends group. “It can be tough to watch nature in action, but we observed some unusual behaviors today that we were able to share with some eagle experts.”

The second eaglet to hatch, INWR 2, still looks strong, the parents are behaving normally with it, and the Friends group is still hopeful that the third egg may hatch soon, Moss and DeLeon said.

You can watch the nest camera streaming through a link at the Friends website, FINWR.com.