Most people spend a lot of time (and money) trying to attract birds to their yards or interact with them in nature. I love to feed the birds and I get very excited when a bluebird or cardinal couple decides to nest in our back yard.
I believe I put out about 50 gallons of hummingbird juice every summer. Some of it is drunk by a raccoon with a taste for red hooch, but most of it goes to feed these little wonders of nature. We have three hummingbird feeders and if you get too close they will buzz you like giant bees.
But never in my wildest dreams did I think a bald eagle couple would take up nesting in my back yard. Well they didn’t. They landed at the home of Mary Ellen and Willard Holthaus in Decorah, Iowa. Yes, my mother and father-in-law.
It all started about four years ago during a terrible windstorm. A pair of bald eagles lost their nesting tree across the road from the Holt-house. My brother-in-law went over to check out the broken nest on the ground and it was huge.
Can you believe a bald eagle nest weighs more than a ton?
Within a couple of days, the eagles found a new branch high in a cottonwood tree that seemed sturdy enough. That branch just happened to be in my in-laws’ yard! The eagles spent a couple of weeks building their new home and then came the first egg. That was in 2008.
The nest became a popular local attraction in Decorah. In 2009, Bob Anderson from the Raptor Resource Project, asked my in-laws if he could put an eagle camera in the nest and use their garage to house his equipment. They agreed. The camera provides a live feed of a wild mating pair of bald eagles.
The male, the slightly smaller eagle, and the female take turns sitting on the eggs and caring for their young hatchlings. Who would have guessed that today more than 136,000 viewers would be watching three baby hatchlings and their parents at any given time?
They panned the yard the other day and Mary Ellen had her laundry on the clothesline. I am sure she didn’t appreciate having her laundry viewed by people in 130 countries around the world!
To me the camera makes the nest seem kind of small, as it is more than six feet long and six feet deep. When they put the cameras up in the tree the cameraman lay down in the nest and stretched out full length!
Many schools are using the eagle camera as a teaching tool and Bob Anderson said he has had a lot of people tell him they like to keep the live camera feed going for hours. Some of these people have told him they were sick or in pain, but they find watching the eagles so relaxing they forget about their illness. Isn’t that amazing?
If you ask my motherin law about the eagles she can only find one downside. When the baby eagles start to fly they like to land on the TV antenna and that doesn’t hold them up very well.
To date the Decorah eagle camera has had more than 7 million viewers! Now here’s my plan…if each viewer would just send me $1.00 (plus shipping and handling) I will send him or her a guaranteed authentic photocopy of real eagle tracks.
Just kidding, you can have these for free.
Taste of Home columnist Sandy (Anderson) Holthaus lives on an alpaca farm in South Haven, MN with her husband, Michael, and their children Zoe, Jack and Ben. Her heart remains on the North Shore where she grew up with her parents, Art and LaVonne Anderson of Schroeder. She enjoys writing about her childhood and mixes memories with delicious helpings of home-style recipes.
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