There's an interesting clip of the Decorah Bald Eagle nest live cam. You get to see a minor parenting mistake made by the male eagle. The female ends up fixing it, but night right away. One thing that I find fascinating about the cam--well all the prey items, Monday one of the birds brought in a muskrat. But you can also see that it takes the pair of eagles awhile to figure out how to solve the problem. That hamster wheel in their brain doesn't turn very fast. The clip is about six minutes long, but I'll show you some high lights with screen captures:
The male was noodling around in the nest. He didn't appear to be feeding the chicks, but picking out uneaten food morsels. The newly hatched chicks instinctively go to peck and beg when the adult's head comes down. This poor eaglet bit into the male eagle's face, looks like right below the eye.
The male jerks his head back and flicks the chick off.
The male then kind of stares at the moved chick for a bit. I think he realized that the chick is not supposed to be there, but doesn't know how to move it back. The chick, out on the edge of the nest where it's cooler begins peeping.
Since the chick is peeping and the male doesn't know what else to do, he feeds it.
Then he hunkers down and broods the chick and remaining egg in the nest cup (I don't think that third egg is going to hatch). The moved chick looks rather indignant. The chick is too small to do much movement on its own and it's still fairly cool, if this chick doesn't get moved back to the middle of the nest to be brooded by the adults, it could die of hypothermia.
The female returned and kind of pushed the male off, who made a hasty retreat. Perhaps he didn't want to be around when the female realized one of the chicks had been moved?
The female soon hunkered down on the chick and egg in the nest cup and it took her a bit to suddenly notice the eaglet outside of it. Even then, you could see her trying to work out in her head what was wrong and how to fix this.
It took 2 or 3 attempts for her to move the chick. She has to be careful, her beak is meant to rip open animals for food, so she doesn't want to accidentally injure the chick. During the final attempt she was able to kind of roll the chick under her. So, a happy ending...but it did take a long time. One of the reasons eagles lay 2 or 3 eggs is that the goal is to get one of those to result in a young eagle leaving the nest. There's the first egg and the others laid after that are a back up plan--insurance in case something happens to the first hatched chick. So many things can go wrong from not enough food, rough weather and well, parenting mistakes.
Also, something else I noticed in that clip is the bird watchers:
See the 2 vehicles? You can even see someone behind the vehicle on the right. Do they know this is the live cam nest or are they random bird watchers?
Here's the YouTube video if you would like to watch the eagle parenting mistake:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ5kPUtqiuw&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]
"Even I'm impressed with how robust my chest is."
The Mississippi River has been flooding a bit in downtown St. Paul, MN. It's an exciting time for us park rangers at 
