Andy Dickerson, executive director of the Milford-based Cardinal Land Conservancy, never thought his organization was the kind to join the nature camera craze. Then the nonprofit land trust—which protects green space, working lands, and urban open space throughout the region—acquired 119 acres at the mouth of the Little Miami River and created Bortz Family Nature Preserve.
Dickerson says he learned from folks at the nearby Four Seasons Marina of a bald eagle nest on the property that was attracting curious visitors who wanted to get up close and personal and hound the birds. “I felt that we could work with some partners and, if we were able to get the money and get an eagle cam up there, people would stay away from the nest,” he says. “They could just watch from above, which is better than any binoculars.”
Volunteers from Davy Resource Group climbed to the nest and mounted a camera, and in 2022 the Cardinal Land Conservency’s Eagle Cam came online. They added a second camera last year, offering viewers twin high-definition, audio-enabled windows into the nesting, egg laying, feeding, fledging, and first flights of a bald eagle family perched near the bank of the Ohio River.
Running a web-enabled cam in a remote location is no easy feat. But with donated technology—including solar panels from Sustainergy, batteries from Sea Ray of Cincinnati, and help from other organizations—Dickerson and his team have tweaked their setup to offer consistent video of these majestic wild animals.
The egg-laying season begins with the pair visiting and carefully rearranging their nest, which is huge—the largest of any North American bird. They add grasses and soft material to make it comfortable for the long hours of incubation during chilly spring days and nights. The bald eagles lay their first eggs in mid-February, says Dickerson says, and the clutch typically hatches in mid-to late March.
Queasy viewers beware: These raptors are hungry. While bald eagles are happy to scavenge—Dickerson has seen them chip frozen fish out of the ice of the nearby river—they bring plenty of very freshly-killed meat back the nest. In addition to fish from the nearby rivers, the cam has shown ducks, squirrels, snakes, possums, and raccoons being butchered at the nest.
The eagle hatchlings grow rapidly and, if everything goes well, take their first flights in early June. Survival rates of young eagles are low. Some biologists estimate eaglet mortality as high at 72 percent within one year of hatching.
Bald eagles are doing far better today, however, than in recent decades when the widespread use of the pesticide DDT caused thinning of their egg shells and few survived to hatching. Bald eagle populations fell to just a few hundred individuals in the lower 48. Following the EPA’s ban of DDT in 1972, bird numbers have rebounded dramatically even though challenges remain—including poisoning from lead bullets and shot found in animal carcasses they scavenge.
Running an eagle cam turns out to be a perfect fit for an organization that, Dickerson says, “is on the cutting edge of conservation on a wide variety of subjects, whether it’s carbon credits, prairie restoration, grazing on pollinator-friendly pastures, and modeling what areas we should be focusing on for ecologically sensitive agriculture.”
So, while keeping in mind that these are wild animals and that nature is often brutal, stay tuned to the Little Miami eagles. Or visit the Bortz Family Preserve, which sports almost two miles of trails, including a spur to the wide, muddy mouth of the Little Miami River. It’s a great spot for all manner of wildlife, so don’t forget your binoculars.
The trail to the eagles’ nest is closed to foot traffic, but later this year Dickerson hopes to partner with Eagle Scouts to install a blind a safe 100 yards from the nest. And he’s on the hunt for researchers interested in further unraveling these raptors’ behavior by GPS-tagging eaglets to learn how their populations move. “They could just go a couple miles away or they could travel 1,000 miles away,” he says. “It would just be nice to know where our babies go.”
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