Today (March 3) Lisa Eye reports an adult bald eagle is sitting on the nest on Lower Church St., northeast of Port Williams. I just drove by the Blomidon Inn, which is adjacent to the eagle nest at the Anglican Church in Wolfville. An adult male eagle was perched at the Inn, and a cursory look at the nest showed nothing; but an eagle sitting down in the cup would be difficult to see. At this time of year adults are known to “pseudo-incubate†without any eggs under them.
This is an interesting time of year for the eagles. Now the paired adults should be on their territories, showing ownership of the area around the nest, adding sticks and redecorating, cementing their pair-bonds in various ways, and indulging in courtship and perhaps mating behaviours.
I’ve been messing around with approximating dates for egg-laying (up to 3 eggs, takes a week), growth of eaglets to fledging (requires 12 weeks or 84 days, until early July or end of June, etc.
Back-dating from early July results in approximately March 10-15 for egg-laying and April 15-20 for hatching of eaglets, which then don’t become visible in the nests until early to mid-May.
These are just vague guesses from someone who spends a lot of time monitoring local nests from his car in eastern King’s County.
Now think about how tough these birds are, i.e., no matter what the weather, the female gets to sit on the eggs for very long periods of the day and night, for 35+ days, and then sit on and guard the growing youngsters for weeks.
Here are a few more stats on bald eagles, from my memory:
Both sexes show white heads and tails at maturity, which takes about five years, and females are much larger than males after fledging, averaging about a kilogram or two pounds different. The size differences are very noticeable even when the immatures are growing in the nest. The large adult females make very good nest defenders, whereas the smaller males are more versatile hunters. It is the males that provide most of the food for the female and eaglets until the latter are a couple of months old.
Bald eagles are quite long-lived, up to nearly 30 years in the wild, versus up to almost 50 years in captivity.
The largest bald eagle we weighed and measured at Acadia University was about 12 kilograms (I need to check this) and had 87 inches of wingspan (7 feet 3 inches).
Cheers from Jim in Wolfville
There was a feeding frenzy in the cove below my house this morning in
French Cove, Rich. Co. I counted 27 Common Mergansers, over 100
Red-breasted Mergansers and 6 Great Cormorants diving in the shallow
water. On the surface were lots of Herring Gulls, Great-Bl-backs and a
Ring-B. Gull waiting for the divers to surface with food. The gulls
were also diving at times for some kind of small fish. It was
interesting, to say the least.
Billy
This afternoon, I had the pleasure of observing two Pileated
Woodpeckers in a one-hour feeding session on a dead and decaying Paper
Birch trunk. They were busy behind a little thicket of young spruce,
maybe 10-15 meters off an occasionally frequented trail in the Dingle
Park (Halifax). Neither passing people nor barking dogs interrupted
their feeding; however, when the beeping of a truck backing up could
be heard in the distance, they immediately interrupted their feeding,
and flew off onto another trunk; after the beeping stopped, they
waited maybe a minute, then returned to their feeding site.
This observation made me realize how far noise can reach, and that its
impact can be hard to assess.
Burkhard
