Nesting in Iowa

I don't know how many of you followed the Decorah Eagles this year.  I did for a while, but then it got kind of boring to sit and watch nothing happen for minutes and sometimes hours at a time.  I eventually lost interest completely and didn't return.

In case you don't know to what I'm referring, the Decorah Eagles are a pair of bald eagles who have nested for several years in or near the town of Decorah, Iowa, and they had a trio of babies this spring.  There is a webcam set up over the nest to track the eagles 24/7 (not 365, because they do migrate as do all birds.)

You could tune in to the webcam whenever you wanted to and watch the goings on.  In fact, according to Wikipedia, it became one of the most-visited live-stream websites in history. but more on that later...

One of my good friends who stayed with the eagle watch informed me recently that, of the three eaglets, one died when it flew into a power line and was electrocuted, another was apparently mauled by some larger predator and suffered a broken wing and loss of tail feathers, and the third is doing well.  The injured one is being cared for at a rescue center and will probably be returned to the wild soon.

Isn't it prophetic that there were three infants and only two survived infancy, while one of those two was injured and might not have a full life after all.  That is Darwinism at its most basic level, and mirrors life for most species.  Man is the only creature on God's Earth that intervenes and/or interferes with natural selection by salvaging the defective ones. But that is a topic for another column.

While I was researching the material for this column, I ran across the original Wikipedia source for the Decorah Eagles, and I learned a lot of interesting, if unverified, facts.  For one, the original webcam was set up by Raptor Resource Project in 2007 and was used by PBS for a documentary on eagles in 2008.  For another, the 2013 season was missed due to the eagles moving their nest to a new location, which wasn't found and re-equipped with the webcam in time.  I've linked the Wikipedia webpage above so that you can read all you want from it at your leisure.

"And now..." as the late and great commentator, Paul Harvey, coined the phrase, "...you know the rest of the story."