Mid Sierra Musings: Golden Eagles Part 3: The Third Chick Is Not An Eagle

Dale Matson

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3rd Chick

As the month of April ended and May began to unfold, these white fuzzy chicks continued to grow and change color as the surrounding fields changed from green to brown.

But there was something, something not quite right, about the development of these three chicks. Why was the runt changing to a darker color before the other two chicks? Shouldn’t the other chicks be changing color sooner? Additionally, the runt seemed to have the most energy. He was walking around the nest while the other siblings slept most of the time. The runt also had a rounder head and much smaller beak.

I continued to hope before each visit that there would be three chicks in the nest. Could this little bird survive or would the chick starve or be eaten by the siblings?

By mid-May I began to realize that we were not looking at an eagle chick at all. If this was the case, then that opened up the original mystery once again. Where did this chick come from? By the following week, we had identified the chick as a Red-Tailed Hawk. I went on the internet and found a case of a hawk being raised by Bald Eagles on Vancouver Island. Well, how did that hawk get in the eagle nest? The experts there agreed that the best theory was that a hawk nest had been raided by a bald eagle and two chicks had been brought back to the eagle nest. One “disappeared” and the other was raised by the eagles along with their three chicks. That must have been a lot of ‘groceries’.

Maybe, hopefully, that would be the case with this chick. The chick seemed to be doing fine and getting along with the eagle chicks. They often slept together in one big pile. However, the hawk chick did stand apart from the other two quite often.

I could always tell when a parent was about to fly-by because all three chicks would look up in the same direction. I had to be reminded that even eagle and hawk chicks have eagle and hawk eyes. They saw the parent before we did even when we used our 10 power binoculars. The birds also watched us as we sat watching them. It was a kind of mutual observation experience.

As these chicks continued to develop and grow, the eagles were pretty much on a sleep/eat cycle with occasional walks around the nest. The hawk was the hyperactive child moving around quite a bit with lots of head bobbing. The hawk began to do a lot of wing flapping too as the eagle chicks looked on in a detached way. The chicks in this nest were probably about the same age and hawks fledge in about 45 days while the goldens fledge in about 65 days. If all went well the hawk would fledge before one of his siblings ate him. I continued to hope that mom and pop continued to bring lots of food to the nest.

This was turning into quite an experience. Not only were Sharon and I watching these eagles develop, we were watching something previously undocumented. This is not to shortchange the eagle chicks which were also massively beautiful.

We were also concerned that to publicize this too soon could lead to an army of visitors that might cause the adults to abandon the nest. It is always a question in any wildlife research of how much observation and what kind of operation is adequate. How close is too close and how many visits are too many visits. Remember, we were watching eagles who know you are coming an hour before you get there. My hope was that at some point one of the adults would bring food to the nest while we were there. Until then, we would make our visits as short and infrequent as possible.

I once photographed a mule deer in Kings Canyon National Park near Reflection Lake with two collars (both a radio collar and GPS collar). Case in point, I wrote an article about this on my blog in 2014. http://midsierramusing.blogspot.com/2014/09/wildlife-research.html