Mama eagle shades the chicks. At this point, they are 9 days old.

Up until this day, I hadn’t seen them out of the central depression, where the failed egg remains. But once they started exploring, they rambled all over.

I’m a little annoyed, because Mama eagle is in the way of a nice shot of the little ones. There were two cameras on the nest, but the bomb cyclone took out one of them, so I can’t switch for a better view.

Oh! I get it now! Mom providing shade for the chicks while they sleep. Now that I understand what she’s doing, I see that she actually shades them a lot.

You can see the remains of a fish at her feet. The failed egg is still in the nest, too.

She spends a lot of time feeding them.

The last couple of days, the male has been covering the chicks up with nest material. I have no idea why.

The male has covered the chicks up. The female finally took nesting material out of his beak and put it back where he had picked it up. Hah! I could practically hear her saying “Will you just stop?”

Not only have the chicks grown, they are beginning to lose their downy feathers, and their beaks and talons are turning from black to grey.

Above: The female has already fed the right hand chick the first half of the fish in her beak. A previous fish is in the left foreground.

I always thought that it was kinda a free-for-all at feeding time for birds — the chicks opened their beaks as wide as they could and the adult dropped food into the biggest mouth. That hasn’t been the case with the eagles — one chick is fed until it is full, then the other is fed. This could be a problem in lean years, but the male has kept the nest full of fish this year.

It took her 8 minutes to feed the second half of the fish to the left chick. By the time she finished, all that remains of the fish are under her talons — not much. She feeds them several times a day, not always as much, but a lot.

As of April 12, 2019, the chicks are 17 days old.