R.I.P. Jackie 🦅

Some quick background context! There's a 24/7 camera on a bald eagle nest in Big Bear, California, run by Friends of Big Bear Valley. The nest is 145 feet up a Jeffrey pine. The eagles are Jackie and Shadow.

Side tangent! I am going to make a post eventually about how, at a certain age, you either get really into birds or really into trees. I'm definitely a bird guy.

I started watching it by myself this spring. Then I put it on the TV in our office, and then it became a whole thing.

People walk by and go "what's the deal with the birds." Then (every time) they stop and stare for like 5 minutes. I have never seen someone ask that question and then leave.

Before standup I'd watch the babies (Sandy and Luna) tear into a fish. We kept the sound low, so every so often the office got a little random squawk out of nowhere.

Eventually, there became a slack channel. Then, I started sharing the daily bird fact from Big Bear.

Some things I learned:

• Eaglets time their jumps to the wind. They use the nest sticks as a launchpad, catch a breeze under their wings, and get 3 to 5 feet of air inside the nest bowl. If they time it right they stall out and hover in place for a few seconds. It's balance training for before they ever leave the tree.
• Coming down from a hover, they throw their feet forward and tackle a heavy log to lock back in.
• Adult eagles spend something like 90 to 95% of daylight hours perched, doing nothing, waiting for a thermal.
• They don't sleep in the nest unless they're brooding. They use a roost tree nearby and sleep in 10 to 20 minute bursts all night.
• The nest can weigh multiple TONS. It's hard to get a sense of scale for these, but these nests are several feet across.

On June 29 we watched one of them fledge, live, from our office in Charlotte. I sent "today may be the day 👀" at 10:49am and "it just happened" at 12:25pm.

Tragically, in July, Jackie got in a fight with two younger eagles, got pretty badly injured, and a wildlife rehab center took her in.

She was there about three weeks before she died on August 10. :(

I was out in California for a wedding last month, so we drove up to Big Bear. Didn't see a single eagle, but I did get to see the lake that's been in the background of my life for months and months.

Shadow is still at the nest. He seems to have a new mate now, a lady they're calling Kaydee. Nature trods along!

The memorial for Jackie is coming up (October 3rd) in Big Bear, but it'll be livestreamed too!

Shout out Jackie. She was a good mama bird!