Baby bald eagle cam, in the nest, real time, 2010

Many have asked why the lens is so cloudy. The answer is baby eagle poop. Solo has been very accurate this season and there is no chance that the lens will be cleaned by a human. Perhaps a good rainstorm will help. Here is the official word from the site.

“Why Can’t You Clean the Cam?”

As many of you have noticed, Solo has been quite accurate in her attempts to hit the cam with her poop shots. I think all of us wish we could just pop up there and clean the lens, possibly gently relocating Charlotte the spider in the process.

Unfortunately we can’t do that for two reasons.

First, the law in BC is very clear that one cannot interfere with active bald eagle nests, even with the best of intentions.

Second, it has been David Hancock’s experience throughout a lifetime of working with eagles and other raptors in British Columbia, that when people go into an active nest, the eagles will not return to that nest the following year.

We all know a number of nests in the United States where scientists routinely enter the nest to band the eaglets without causing the eagles to abandon the nest once the eaglets have fledged. However, David knows of many more in BC that were abandoned after people visited the nest to assess and/or band the eaglets. As this nest is in BC, David considers it likely that it would follow the same pattern that he has seen at every nest in BC where he banded an eaglet in his younger days – the eagles would raise their young, and once the eaglets fledged, they’d abandon a perfectly good nest and build a new nest, not necessarily at as prime a location, and often giving up a year of nesting to get set up in their new location.

It is indeed possible that these eagles are more used to seeing people than some of those David encountered during the days he was involved with banding, and possible that they might not abandon the nest if we were able to get the necessary permits, get permission from the landowner to enter the site, raise the $1000 or so it costs to rent the giant crane, etc to access the nest to clean the cam. But it’s not a chance David, or Hancock Wildlife, is willing to take.