Happy Fri-yay, everyone! Grab the popcorn and look for great close-ups, two food fights, and very cool fly-ins and vocalizations in Decorah, and a pellet casting and nestorations at our Fort St. Vrain nest. thanks to our excellent crew of camera operators and video makers for finding and sharing special moments in the nest with us!
Looking for something to do besides watching eagles? We’ve added a prey log feature to our website. To submit your prey observations, go to the Decorah, Decorah North, or Fort St. Vrain pages on our website at www.raptorresource.org and click the ‘Prey Log’ link up above the streams. We’ll periodically post observations (without names or any identifying information) to help up everyone keep up with our eagle eating plan! If Grey squirrel is the next big sustainable meat trend, the Decorah and Decorah North eagles are leading it!
Decorah Eagles
2/8/19: DM2 brings prey, mantles, Mom teakettles – https://youtu.be/NZ7X_3r98PY. DM2 has been pretty good about giving up food, but he doesn’t want to share this time! After he attempts to move him fail, she backs away and puts the teakettle on! She remains persistant but not forceful, eventually hopping out to perch on the Skywalk (we see her shadow) before flying out, possibly to seek her own dinner (aka lunch in Iowa).
2/7/19: Mom wins the food fight, defurs and eats lunch – https://youtu.be/7UDSKq_NTwE. When Mom wants lunch, she gets it! DM2 appears to eating when Mom flies in, shoulders him, aside, and takes over. DM2 is very graceful about the whole thing. He gives up his lunch and eventually flies out to stand sentinel on the Skywalk while Mom gobbles down dinner before it gets too cold! Look for an eagle heart at 1:13.
2/7/19: 7:45 am DM2 closeups, to maple – https://youtu.be/JK4q7cxz5f4. Spectacular close-ups start around 4:30. As Tulsa points out, the ice on DM2’s back is a testament to how well his feathers insulate him; his body heat doesn’t escape enough to melt the ice! Stunningly beuatiful footage of a handsome male eagle.
2/6/19: Beautiful fly-ins, lots of vocals – https://youtu.be/-EmpjvNXr3A. While we know that mutual vocalization is part of eagle courtship, this looks more a nest alert to me. Both eagles are clearly looking at something we can’t see. Look for cool fly-ins and vocalizations at the start of the video! If only we knew what they were saying…
Fort St. Vrain Eagles
2/6/19: FSV Dad casts a pellet – https://youtu.be/VhKJ8yh2ZFE. A short but excellent look at pellet casting. Bald eagles and other birds of prey deal with indigestible materials like fur, feathers, and teeth by squeezing them into a pellet in their powerful gizzards and reguritating them back up.
2/6/19: FSV morning activity: https://youtu.be/-AqsvnVF12w. I like to compare and constrast the nests we watch. While a lot of eagle behavior is similar across nests (male eagles seem to do most of the work on the nest bowl and egg cup, female eagles incubate and brood at night, just to name two things), I love seeing how the nests are different. Xcel Energy’s FSV nest is located by a river in the middle of a semi arid area. There are no row crops but there is a lot of grass! The nest is also a lot drier since materials compost much more slowly in low humidity.
The Raptor Resource Project