Golden Eagle Story 2020

Dale Matson

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         This is the third year Sharon and I have watched the same pair of Golden Eagles raise two chicks to fledge. We began watching in mid-January and concluded today. The story begins and ends with an empty nest. In January we watched the pair refurbishing the nest. By the third week of February the birds were taking turns sitting on the nest. Often, one of the birds would perch atop the nest tree to keep an eye out for danger. By mid-April the adults were feeding two very small white and fluffy chicks.

         The parents really co-parented the chicks as they had in the two previous years. The best light for viewing was after sunrise. One parent would bring food like a squirrel or rabbit. It would drop it in the nest and begin to feed the chicks. Then the other parent would fly off for more food.

         This is as much about the cooperative effort to raise the chicks as it is about the chicks themselves. Early on, both could be seen perched together on their favorite branch back up the road from the nest.

         As the chicks grew, they became very large and looked like large black emperor Penguins. We had one unexpected event which was the premature fledging of the older chick. It happened near the end of April. We came and there was only one bird left? We hope the parents continued to feed it but never saw it on the nest again. The last chick fledged almost to the day of the previous chicks last year.

         It is always amazing to me that the adults, can use their beaks like tweezers to distribute food but those beaks can do deadly things to prey.

         We tried to respect their privacy as much as possible and rarely stayed more than an hour, sitting in my truck. I used a Sony A7R4 camera with the Sony 200-600mm G lens. I also had a 1.4 TC which gave me considerable magnification. Sharon had image stabilized 12X40 Canon binoculars and helped me anticipate when the adults were about to land on the nest. To the parents, another job well done.

         We have also been watching (from above), a Bald Eagle nest with three chicks that are about to fledge. I’ll have a report on that and photos also.