We’re getting a lot of questions about watching the Decorah Eagles in the 2021/2022 season. John talked about this during our interview with Iowa Public TV last night and I wanted to share it with the wider world.
Are we going to be able to watch the Decorah Eagles next season? It’s gotten very complicated. The N3 nest tree (as many of you know from Robin’s Day Trips) is dead. Even if the landowner was excited about streaming, we can’t climb the tree to install cameras and we don’t know how well we can see them from adjacent trees, or how long those trees will remain healthy.
Bald eagles tend to abandon nest trees once the crown has died back and stopped producing leaves, so we don’t even know whether Mom and DM2 will stay. They could return to the hatchery and N2B or build a new nest in another tree. Eagle researcher Mark Stahlmaster didn’t count eagle nests as abandoned until they went five years without use, which gives us hope for N2B. Here’s a video that gave several of you hope for a new nest at N1. Mom looks lovely and neither of the eagles seem ready to rent out N2B!
So: we were working on ways to stream N3 until we learned that the nest tree was dead. This new wrinkle has caused us to rethink our plans. We’ll continue to watch the hatchery in person and remotely, and hope to know a little more about Mom and DM2’s plans by early September. We’ll share our observations with you. You can help us by sharing your observations via youtube, explore, facebook, and our website as we watch and wait to see what they do!
The Raptor Resource Project