Spying on the Neighbors

First, let me make it clear that today’s post does not advocate spying on your neighbors as a general principle. But it does encourage you to take a peek at some feathered neighbors of mine: a pair of wild bald eagles that are nesting in northeast Iowa near the town of Decorah. For the past several years, an Eagle Cam has provided a bird’s eye view (you knew that one was coming, didn’t you?) of their nest.

What’s remarkable about this is both being able to see the birds so closely, 24/7, but also the number of people around the world who have logged onto the Eagle Cam website. Last year alone the site had 3.9 million visits from more than 125 countries. At any given time, some 12,000 viewers are on-line watching.

The camera is operated by the non-profit Raptor Resource Project. The nest is in a tree near the Decorah Fish Hatchery and is about 80 feet in the air overlooking a trout stream. On the scale of nests, it’s a Big Momma—six feet across and weighing about 1.5 tons. The eggs were laid in late February and are expected to hatch around April 1, so you may want to bookmark the site and check back in. (When you first open the site, there’s a 30-second commercial, which pays for the cost of the bandwidth. After that, you can watch without commercial interruption.)

What an amazing thing it is to be able to see this, isn’t it? No matter what sort of day you’re having, you can click onto the site and hear songbirds twittering in the background and watch as a slow-motion miracle unfolds.