Putting you right into the heart of the eagle's nest, a new camera is going live in Minnesota, permanently focused on a breeding pair of bald eagles.
Nicknamed EagleCam, the camera is operated by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and will go live this Thursday. It replaces the previous EagleCam, which was trained on a different breeding pair whose 20-year-old nest tragically collapsed during a snowstorm in 2023, killing their chick.
The old camera was wildly popular, with viewers in 50 states and around 160 countries live-streaming the family of eagles into homes, classrooms, and nursing homes, according to Lori Naumann, a spokesperson for the DNR’s Nongame Wildlife Program, which runs the cameras.
The previous camera is still live, and the breeding pair, nicknamed ‘Nancy and Beau’ allegedly still visit the old site, and have made a new nest in the area. Naumann told reporters that the older pair had thousands of viewers at any one time before the nest collapsed.
The new pair are also experienced parents, having reared several broods of eaglets, and have lived in their nest for over four years.
Both cameras will go live at roughly 6:00am CST on Thursday on the DNR website and the agency’s YouTube channel.
Conservation organizations have had previous success in spreading information about species through a rattlesnake live stream in Colorado, and a rare Osprey nest in Canada.
While there won’t be a huge amount of activity on the nest at the moment, Naumann told AP News that activity will pick up in the coming months.
“It’s not really breeding season right now,” she said. “We expect them to start bringing new branches and new nesting material into the nest over the next several months, when their courtship behavior will start ramping up. And when that happens, they actively build the nest together, showing their dedication to each other and their worthiness of being a partner.”
The female is expected to lay around three eggs around February, and they’ll take about 35 days to hatch, after which both parents will care for the chick equally.
As for Nancy and Beau, it wasn’t feasible to install a new nest, where they raised two new chicks last season. So the DNR searched for a perfect tree to film them in as they come and go. They installed the camera in early October at a cost of $5,000, and Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy provided the bucket lift truck and other services for free.
The DNR spends about $50,000 a year on bald eagle conservation efforts, which due to their tireless conservation efforts has made an incredible comeback since 1978 when it was given federal protection.
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