I was in the path of the total eclipse of the sun on Monday, 21 August 2017. The birds stopped singing. Until just a few minutes before the moon completely eclipsed the sun, goldfinches, cardinals, and crows sang and called, an occasional Turkey Vulture soared overhead, and a flock of Barn Swallows chatted and flew over the fields. Two or three minutes before the total eclipse, the birds became still, while the crickets got louder.

I was in farm land – acres of green crops, small groves of trees along a creek, a couple of gravel roads, and only two other humans nearby.

The shadow progressed gradually over an hour or so. My Cheerios box with a tiny pinhole showed me the slowly growing crescent. The dimming of light was unnoticeable at first, then became unmistakable. My own shadow on the ground grew faint. At some point the screen on my cell phone became more readable than it is in broad daylight. The skies turned from bright blue with a few wispy clouds, to pastel blue, then to gray. The fields got darker, the trees less distinct. It didn’t look like dusk or dawn – the colors across the land were muted.

The total eclipse came abruptly. One second there was light, then all was in shadow, as if an overhead light had been switched off and only a weak night-light prevented pitch black. The dazzling corona of the sun shone around the edges of the moon, and the distant horizon, outside the umbra, showed some rosy hues. One bright star popped into view. Everything stopped, except the crickets.

The eclipse lasted about two minutes. Then all of a sudden the surrounding dimness was banished in a surprising wash of color as the surface of the sun emerged from behind the moon. The brightness was an illusion – only a sliver of the sun was showing, but it seemed as if the switch had been flipped back on. The restoration of daylight after the slow minutes of anticipation seemed quicker than the fading. Shadows reappeared everywhere – trees, farm buildings, road signs, fences, me. Crops and trees turned green. The sky was blue again.

Soon birds became active, chirping, calling, flying. The swallows took wing after insects, vultures lifted to the sky, a Carolina Wren sang, a Red-Tailed Hawk flew across the fields and perched atop a tall maple.

About five minutes after the sun reappeared, a rooster crowed. Then another, and then another.

I was struck by a feeling of bigness. The wide expanse of sky, in which two huge celestial bodies implausibly converged. Daylight turning precipitously into a vast eerie twilight. Hundreds and thousands of vertebrates and invertebrates unexpectedly moved to alter their behavior. Millions of people across the continent changing their normal routines in order to take in the other-worldly event. The astounding exactitude of the scientists’ predictions of times – to the second – and places – to the geographical degree and minute. The breath-taking rarity and the improbable opportunity afforded a small creature like me to be part of something so enormous. This was not a movie or a documentary or a news report. I was actually there. How cool is that?

I captured a few minutes of video, not of the sun but of the countryside, which to me was infinitely more interesting than the sun.  https://youtu.be/q23aTXWfVnc

The 2017 breeding season is well underway, and as we approach the end of January it’s about to get crazier.  I have finished compiling comprehensive 10-year calendars of egg-laying dates at the nests for which we have reliable observations. Here are the calendars for January and February.  You will find the other months under the Bald Eagle Nest Cams menu.

Based on previous years, we might expect to see eggs between now and mid-February at the DNR nest in Minneapolis, John Bunker Sands Wetlands in TX, several nests on the Catalina Islands, Blackwater Wildlife Refuge in MD, Upper Mississippi River Refuge in IL, nests in TN and DC, Turtle Bay nest in northern CA, Lake of the Ozarks in MO, Davenport IA, and nests in Pittsburgh and at Duke Farms in NJ.

We’re also going to start seeing some more nestlings hatch.

As the title of this post suggests, these few dozen nests on cam are a tiny fraction of the Bald Eagle nests across North America where courtship, nest-building, egg-laying, and hatching have gotten well underway. For another year running, the population of Bald Eagles is about to surge.

Buckle up.

First of all, I am overwhelmed by the response I’m getting here and on Facebook.  You all are very kind, and I hope that I don’t disappoint as we move forward.

Second, I’ve posted the January 2007-2017 calendar and made a few minor corrections to the November and December calendars.  I’ve also made them pdfs instead of jpgs, which I think might be easier to read.  Notice that you can scroll through the pages of a pdf.

I will tackle February soon, but my it will be a challenge — elebenty billion eagles lay eggs in February!

High on my list is a tabulation of timings between eggs laid over the last 10 years.  The data we now have provide good evidence of the process of egg development.

This web site has been a gleam in my eye for about 5 years, since I began watching eagle (and other wildlife) cams, reading about birds, and working as a volunteer for raptor rehab organizations.  I have big plans for the site — probably way bigger than the time I have left to devote to it.

I have been waiting to get things up and running because I wanted to have a lot more to show for all these years of learning. I’ve been promising various people over the years that I really would do this, and I think most of them stopped believing me a while ago. So instead of presenting a finished product, I’m presenting a work just barely begun. The beginning of a new Bald Eagle nesting season seems like the right time to toss some pages out there.

I’m beginning with a bit of information that I’ve collected and tabulated about the nest cams, notably a calendar of egg-laying that covers the 11 years that observers have recorded nest activity and logged their observations, especially at the Hancock Wildlife Forum and the Channel Islands EagleCAM Forum, (and I extend profound thanks to all those dozens of journalists who have diligently and faithfully posted there — what an astounding collection of information!). Go to Bald Eagle Nest Cams on the menu to see what I’ve gathered so far.

The design of the web site is basic. I will probably be fiddling with it as time goes on, but right now I’ve opted to spend time on content rather than design.

If you want to follow my blog (where I’ll try to put out alerts to new content), you can subscribe with your email addy over there → .