A bird's eye view of nesting eagles

RELEASE: April 17, 2009 – Volume XLI, No. 16

Internet videos have been growing like weeds in recent years. Take a look at YouTube, for example. Online videos run the gamut from silly to serious, from polished and professional to totally amateurish. But a most inspiring – and downright addicting – video is the Duke Farms Eagle Cam!

The Eagle Cam – which can be found at www.dukefarms.org - allows nature lovers to watch, in real time, a pair of bald eagles and their three newly-hatched eaglets. The video camera is located in a tree 60 feet from the nest, and delivers an excellent picture without disturbing the eagle family.

The stars of this reality show are an eagle pair that has been nesting at the 2,700-plus acres of Duke Farms in Hillsborough since 2005. By the green band on his leg, the male eagle is known to have been born in New Jersey. The female is also banded, but experts have not been able yet to tell from where. Eagles mate for life, and this pair has already raised six eaglets.

On March 4, Eagle Cam confirmed three eggs in the nest. Just over a month later, on April 6, the first chick was spotted. The second was hatched on April 8, and the third on April 12. At this very moment, the majestic Mama Eagle is serving lunch to three fuzzy baby eaglets – a wriggling, freshly-caught eel!

The bald eagle is one of wildlife conservation’s greatest successes. The ban on Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT) in 1972 and protections afforded by the federal Endangered Species Act have given the bald eagle the chance to overcome years of declining population.

In New Jersey, for example, only a single pair of nesting bald eagles was recorded in 1985. By last year that number had climbed to 69 pairs; and from those, 85 eaglets were hatched in 50 nests. A survey in January 2008 tallied 264 birds, a new record high.

Today, bald eagles face a different kind of threat: sprawl and development. Unlike cardinals and a number of other bird species, eagles are extremely sensitive to human presence, which severely limits their available nesting sites.

The Duke Farm Eagle Cam allows people an up-close view of the eagle family in a way that’s safe for everyone! More than 630 viewers are checking them out as I write this, and over 20,000 total have peeked in so far, making it one of the most popular video streams hosted by Ustream.tv Inc.

Duke Farms has been working on this webcam project up for about four years. It’s the fruit of a partnership with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting our state’s Endangered and Nongame Species Program.

“We have been encouraged by the popular public response to Eagle Cam,” said Gene Huntington, director of Natural Resources for Duke Farms. “It has been a great conduit for place-based, wildlife education without disturbing habitat, which is a goal of the New Jersey Wildlife Action Plan.”

As one of the largest privately-owned undeveloped parcels in New Jersey, Duke Farms helps protect the habitat of endangered wildlife. The Duke family’s former estate has long been a horticultural marvel, and today its mission is to serve as a model of environmental stewardship. The Eagle Cam provides biologists and nature lovers with an outstanding opportunity to watch a pair of nesting eagles raise their young, an amazing sight!

The Duke Farms eagle family isn’t the only subject of streaming video in New Jersey. The Conserve Wildlife Foundation’s website at www.conservewildlifenj.org also offers a live streaming Peregrine Cam showing a pair of nesting peregrine falcons on a building in Jersey City. So far, those eggs are still in the incubation stage, so there’s plenty of good viewing to come.

Enjoy the best streaming videos on the Web, and I hope you will consult New Jersey Conservation Foundation’s website at www.njconservation.org or contact me at info@njconservation.org, if you would like more information about conserving New Jersey’s precious land and natural resources.

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