Earlier this week I found a link to a live webcam chronicling the day-to-day doings of a nesting pair of bald eagles. Two of the avian couple's three February-laid eggs had hatched in recent days, and anticipation of the third eaglet's arrival resulted in such a spike of on-line viewers that the website hosting the live stream crashed for a period of time. Even now, as I write this, there are some 150,000 people world-wide viewing the goings-on inside this one and a half ton nest atop an 80 foot cottonwood tree on someone's private property in Decorah, Iowa.
Three cheers for those numbers. That's 150,000 people not watching Charlie Sheen smoke a cigarette through his nose.
It's not really difficult to understand the allure of this particular live stream. Even when nothing is going on, when the mother eagle is just idly (if dutifully) sitting on her brood, it's pretty compelling viewing. It's not often we get a chance to see animals as they actually behave when we're not around. Even the most conscientiously discreet wildlife photographers and film makers would seem to be fooling themselves that their subjects aren't aware of their presence in some measure, and altering their behavior accordingly.
Here, there is no photographer, no human presence at all, only two cameras fastened to branches adjacent to the nest, providing a clear, live feed round the clock (at night, the main camera switches to infrared). The eagles have no idea the cameras are there and thus go about their business as their species has for time immemorial, and in no less an intimate setting than the nest to boot.
I think that's what is so fascinating: everything we get to see takes place in the nest. Hundreds of miles of film stock have been dedicated over the years to depicting bald eagles in flight, bald eagles high on their perch, bald eagles snatching fish from the water with a mid-flight swish of fully extended talons. The bald eagle is our national symbol after all...we love watching it, and we like to think it plucks fish from the water kind of like America plucks evil off the world stage.
But we never hear the rest of the story. Never get to know what happens with that fish once its carried off.
This is the pair's fourth year at the same location, and they must be doing something right. Each year has resulted in a successful batch of fledglings. Considering how scarce bald eagles were until recent years (they were endangered when I was a school kid, and to this day, though they have rebounded and were taken off the Endangered Species list in 2007, spotting one still strikes me as incredible), it's heartening to know of this pair's success.
Sit and view this cam long enough (or not really long at all; fifteen minutes will do), you're bound to see behaviors that are hard not to be moved by, that might even impel you to anthropomorphize. The female fussily tends to her three downy eaglets (the last remaining egg was on the brink of hatching when I first logged on, then proceeded to hatch before my eyes), repeatedly repositioning herself over them in a side-to-side gesticulation that can't help but look like a gentle rocking motion. In certain moments of candid repose, it's hard not to wonder (even fancifully) what she's thinking...not in the human sense perhaps, but the more intriguing instinctual level so fine-tuned in animals. What processes of consciousness might be coursing through her brain when she's merely sitting and staring off?
There must be something happening, vigilance if nothing else, vigilance for intruders, or perhaps a visual scan for her mate and the sustenance he brings. To think otherwise - that is, that animals possess no feelings at all, are just biological blank slates - is a slippery slope to believing they don't deserve our respect, protection or consideration.
There are other intriguing attentions to detail I've observed that underscore the complexity of these creatures; the mother grabbing a beakful of nest material and packing it close to whatever side of her body the wind is blowing from as added insulation for the babies; the exacting matter in which she, with a delicateness that belies her fierce countenance, feeds them; the evident rivalry that has emerged between the chicks in a short period of time, jockeying for their mother's attention, climbing over each other to be the first fed; the fact that male and female parent share nest-sitting responsibility, periodically switching off. The moment of that switch-off, when one lands on the nest, reports for duty so to speak, and the other takes off, is strange and lovely. Though from what I can see, it's the female who spends most of the time guarding the brood.
The male's job is primarily bringing food home. Often he lands on the nest and - in an astonishing and further anthropomorphic gesture - lays down a fish in front of her, then flies away and returns a while later with another. Its pulsing gills indicate it is still alive, that it has just been snagged from some nearby lake or river, perhaps the Upper Iowa, or maybe the little brook that flows directly under their tree.
In either case, as fresh as fresh fish can be.
There is a simple rhythm to the life this family leads, where elsewhere in the world, our overly complex, frenzied human existence plays out one violent, noisy breakdown at a time. How marvelous to be able to while away an afternoon with them, to hear the sounds they hear from their perch (the buffeting of the chilly wind, the occasional howl of a truck passing on the nearby road, the closer, but less frequent, whinny of horses, indicating some kind of human dwelling in the immediate vicinity, even the incessant cheeping of the eaglets)...How lucky are we that a camera can be placed in close but unobtrusive proximity, without disturbing the animals, and set to broadcast their world in full color and sound, in real time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
We must be careful (or I must be, anyway) not to delude ourselves about this world when viewing it from the comfort our laptops. Like all animals, these eagles live a simple life, but a harsh life, rich with ever-present danger and hardship. It is not simple the way humans strive to be simple. Mortality rate amongst eaglets is high (intraspecies violence, not to mention sibling rivalry, is commonplace) and these animals have no control over external forces, only the ability to react; usually ineffectually, if those forces are negative.
But all the more reason why we are lucky are we to have this technology at our disposal. We can watch and observe, share in the good and absorb the bad.
Although so far, nothing bad has happened for the Decorah, Iowa eagles, at least not this year. In just the few days I've been watching, the eaglets' growth has been astonishing, and they have already taken to roaming about the nest and trying to feed themselves.
I for one plan to keep watching. A summer well spent.
