SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. — Those at the National Conservation Training Center are anxiously awaiting the arrival of two new eaglets.
NCTC Fish and Wildlife historian Doctor Mark Madison is excited. “Man, I feel like I’m in the (labor and delivery) waiting room reading a magazine,” he said Friday, chuckling.
“They could be hatching while I talk to you,” Madison said during an appearance on Panhandle Live.
“We have two viable eggs. We expect to have two chicks, which we call eaglets.”
“They’ve been incubating for about 37 days and this is when they hatch,” Madison said of the period right now through about the end of March.
“Right now they’re very large,” Madison said of the eaglets. “They’re pretty much the full size of the egg. They have an interesting thing on their beak, a little notch sometimes called an egg tooth, although they don’t have teeth.”
“It’s big and. (using it,) they’re going to start eventually, probably today or tomorrow, punching a little hole in the egg.”
Madison said it can take up to 12 hours for an eaglet to punch out a hole big enough to get out of the egg.
“And then they’re going to immediately start chirping for food, just like human babies,” Madison said, chuckling again.
The adult eagles have been busy. “Already they’ve been fixing up the nest, bringing up new branches. Bringing up a lot of food so the parents are ready for when the chicks hatch, because they grow so incredibly fast.”
“If you go to the NCTC Eagle Cam, it’s amazing how quickly they grow. Basically, the parents are going to spend all their time. Catching food,” Madison said, adding, “I’ve got teenage boys, it’s pretty much the same thing.”
For those who follow the eagle’s nest on line, Madison said, “There’s a very active group sometimes called the Eagle Momsters, I think, as they feel like they’re parents for these eagles, that will give you all the updates possible, tell you what’s going on at the nest.”
“There are people that watch it at night, they’ll tell you if an owl came by and got scared off,” Madison says as an example. “It’s just a real active, fun group for people who like eagles.”
This year is one of rebuilding, as the parent eagles have been boosting up a newer nest that they had started before a wind storm last year blew down the nest that had sat in its position for years. When the older nest came down last April, three eaglets who had hatched weeks before did not survive the fall.