Nestcam Notes Photos Courtesy of Eagles Online   Feeding Time May 2 (15 days old) In this photo, one of the parents is feeding the baby. Do you see how the adult must lean over and hold its head sideways to offer the food? Adult eagle beaks are very dangerous, but eagle parents use them very tenderly to feed their little ones. The adults must tear fish into small chunks and put it into the mouth of a baby this size. By the time this eaglet is 3-4 weeks old, it will start pecking at its food, but won't be able to actually tear chunks of fish off by itself until it's about 6 weeks old. Home Alone? This little baby is all alone. Two consecutive photos, five minutes apart, show it all by itself in the nest. Apparently the parents left it alone at least that long. Where are the parents? Most likely they are searching for food! The photos were taken in the morning, when adults and chicks are both hungriest. Some days fishing is good and easy, but some days it's hard to catch anything. The parents need to catch enough food for their baby, and also enough to keep up their own strength. 8:25 am 8:30 am 18 days old (Hatched April 17, Photo May 5) There are some other possibilities. An Osprey might have darted at one parent (Osprey often defensively attack eagles) and the other eagle parent may have joined in the fray. Or the parent on the nest may have simply flown to the top of the nest tree to preen and be by itself for a little while. May 2 (15 days old) The eagle is now 2 weeks old. Usually for the first 2-3 weeks of an eaglet's life, its mother is with it 90% of the time and its father is there 50% of the time. At least one parent is at the nest close to 100% of the time. But by the time this chick is 5-6 weeks old, the parents will be there far less. The little eaglet has no one to defend it while the parents are absent, no one to shade it from hot sun or protect it from rain. (But we can see from the photo that it's not raining.) Look how close to the edge it is! Baby eagles are adventurous and curious, but virtually never fall from the nest until they are much bigger and ready to fledge. They have two competing instincts--curiosity and fear. When eagles have a lot of curiosity, they are likely to catch the most food, detect predators and dangerous situations quickly, and survive better than eagles that aren't so curious. But if they don't have at least a little fear, they would die as chicks and never reproduce. So this little eagle has an instinct that tells it not to jump from the nest when it's this little--just the right amount of fear to keep it safe even as it's learning all about the big world it will soon be flying high above. A Bad Egg Do you see the unhatched egg that is still in the nest with the little eagle? Based on the laying dates, this egg will never hatch. It probably was infertile to begin with, like a grocery store chicken egg. Another possibility is that the eaglet inside may have been deformed and died without hatching. Some species of birds toss out egg shells, and also toss out unhatched eggs a few days after the other babies hatch, but eagles do not. Any egg sitting in the sun for days or weeks is going to become rotten! In the book Charlotte's Web, there's a scene with Templeton the rat taking a rotten egg which gets broken and makes the whole barn stink! Fortunately, eagle eggs usually have very strong shells, so this one is not likely to break before it's all dried up. Nest Sanitation Eagles eat a lot, so they poop a lot. Eagle poop has a lot of "whitewash" in it, so if the baby were pooping in the nest, it would be noticeable in these photos. Eagles don't produce fecal sacs as most songbirds do. Instead, the baby eagles wander to the edge of the nest, turn around, and poop off the edge. The nest may be clean, but we bet the branches beneath are spattered with whitewash! The "whitewash" in bird poop (why it's mostly white) is the bird's urine. Kidneys filter the blood, and the nitrogen wastes are excreted as urine. In mammals, the nitrogen wastes are in the form of urea, which is yellowish, has an ammonia-like smell and is very toxic, so needs to be diluted with a LOT of water to keep from poisoning the animal or human. (Mammalian fetuses actually start excreting urine while they're still inside the mother, but her amniotic fluid dilutes it and is constantly being "cleaned" by her blood.) Birds grow in eggs, so can't excrete urea. So they excrete their nitrogen wastes as uric acid, which is white and, although very toxic, precipitates to a solid when very concentrated. Inside the egg, when a chick excretes blood wastes, they collect in a little chamber called the"allantois." When you find the shell of a successfully hatched egg, you sometimes can see the chalky deposit.   Copyright 2003 Journey North. All Rights Reserved. Please send all questions, comments, and suggestions to our feedback form