I set out yesterday to locate a bald eagle nest, and found one a few miles from the house. It helped quite a bit that I had latitude and longitude coordinates and knew that this nest was on public land.
I found the nest after a few twists and turns on back roads, and a short walk through the woods.
The nest was in a sycamore tree, where a creek came into the Monocacy River.
The eagles will have laid their first egg this week or last, and there should be an adult sitting on the nest, but she will be buried deep in the sticks in order to keep the eggs warm.
It was 25 degrees out, and it was going to drop to 15 degrees at night. The fact that Bald Eagles lay eggs in snow and ice storms and keep them warm, at all cost, with nothing but a pile of sticks and a few feathers to do the job, is nothing less than amazing.
Was the nest occupied?
I peered up at the sticks, but I was not lucky enough to be observing from near nest height as I was last year at another location, so there was nothing to see.
And then a spied a Bald Eagle in flight above the nest. It was probably the male, but both birds will take turn sitting on the nest. This was definitely an occupied nest!
Bald eagle eggs hatches are timed to coincide with the shad, herring, and perch runs up the river.
The birds almost exclusively eat fish, and there's no shortage of that in this area. In fact, the Chesapeake Bay area has more Bald Eagle nests than anywhere else in the Continental U.S., and the densest concentrations of nests can be found along the James, Potomac, and Rappahannock rivers.
Eggs laid the first week in March will hatch in late March or early April and the chicks will stick around until June.
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