Martin Muller wrote:
>Discovery Park has two six-week-old eaglets. They were fed crow (most likely
>nestling crow) while I observed. One of the eaglets tried to take the prey
>from the adult female who brought it in, but she took it back and fed both of
>them after plucking, sending blackish feathers drifting off in the breeze.

I have always thought that the bald eagles nesting in the greater Seattle
area made for an interesting story but their numbers have grown to a level
that seems phenomenal. There has got to be a good magazine story in all of
this.

Hearing about the baby crow being fed to the eaglets made me think of Jim
Watson's Raptor Research paper on the instances in Washington where bald
eagles were found to be rearing not only there own eaglets but a red-tailed
hawk nestling too. This happened in two or three instances. Jim puzzled
over all of the facts at hand and decided that there was only one plausible
scenario. One of the adults likely took a red-tailed hawk nestling out of a
nearby hawk nest and delivered it to the bald eagle nestlings as potential
prey. For some reason, the adult eagle did not kill the hawk nestling and
ended up raising it.

It was apparently quite a surprise for the biologist flying the bald eagle
productivity count to find mixed species broods. In fact, she landed, got a
video camera and went back up in a helicopter to document the situation on film.

Kelly McAllister
alleyes at tssnet.tss.net