Watch California’s Internet-Famous Bald Eagles Tend to Three New Eggs, Expected to Hatch Soon
Last year, the mated pair Jackie and Shadow also incubated three eggs—but none of them hatched. This year’s “pipping period,” when chicks may break out of their shells, begins in early March
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Jackie and Shadow, a mated pair of internet-famous bald eagles in California, are back on their nest and expecting “triplets” for the second year in a row.
The Big Bear Valley “power couple” has thousands of fans around the world, thanks to a couple of cameras that provide a 24-hour live stream of their nest, writes the Los Angeles Times’ Andrew J. Campa.
The webcams are run by Friends of Big Bear Valley, a nonprofit conservation group working to protect the 15-mile-long valley in Southern California. The organization installed its first nest camera in October 2015 and has been broadcasting the soap opera-like successes and failures of various eagle pairs ever since.
Many online viewers report feeling connected to the birds because of the live streams. They “find themselves doing a lot of things that Jackie and Shadow do, which is getting along, working together and taking care of each other,” Sandy Steers, the executive director of Friends of Big Bear Valley, tells the Los Angeles Times.
“Plus… it gives them something to look at besides the dark stuff on the internet,” she adds.
The current stars—12-year-old female Jackie and 10-year-old male Shadow—have been mates since the summer of 2018. They’re nesting in a tall Jeffrey pine tree at Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino mountains east of Los Angeles. The nest is roughly 145 feet above the ground.
Though Jackie and Shadow have successfully mated and laid eggs each year they’ve been together, just a handful of their offspring have survived long enough to leave the nest. Only about half of bald eagle eggs hatch to begin with, and only 70 percent of eaglets survive their first year of life, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Last year, the couple laid three eggs for the first time—which they dutifully incubated, even during severe El Niño winter storms. Amid the frigid weather, Jackie sat on the nest for nearly 62 hours straight. Unfortunately, none of the eggs hatched.
“It could be that the temperatures we had during the incubation period, and when they were laid, were not that good,” Steers told Popular Science’s Laura Baisas last March. “It could be the amount of oxygen. We’re at a very high altitude, higher than most eagle’s nests, so we have low oxygen levels to begin with. … We also had those big storms. It could also be something biological that just was off when the eggs were created, or during the development process. We just don’t know.”
This year, Jackie and Shadow have once again produced three eggs. Jackie laid the first egg on January 22, followed by another on January 25 and the third on January 28.
They’ve been taking turns incubating the clutch, including an almost 46-hour stint from Jackie during a winter storm around Valentine’s Day, reports the Sacramento Bee’s Helena Wegner. As Jackie sat on the eggs, Shadow appeared with a fish he had caught for her. The eagle dad stepped in for incubation duty after she ate the fish.
Online fans are hopeful that Jackie and Shadow will have success this time around. They’re counting down the days to the “pipping period,” or the time when chicks begin the process of breaking out of their shells. Pipping typically occurs after roughly 35 days of incubation, so livestream viewers could start to see some action around the beginning of March.
“This is the only reality show worth watching… can’t get enough!” one fan wrote on the Friends of Big Bear Valley Facebook page.
Bald eagles are a conservation success story. In 1963, just 417 nesting pairs remained in the United States. But as of 2019, some 71,400 nesting pairs were once again soaring through America’s skies.
