An immature bald eagle rooting around the Pittsburgh bald eagle’s nest was quickly shoved out by the resident male, which pounced on the intruder and chased the young bird away.
A live webcam sponsored by PixCams and the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania caught all the action on Jan. 9.
This is not new at the nest, on a bluff overloong the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh’s Hays neighborhood. Intruding eagles have shown up at before and each time, one of the nesting pair has deftly escorted those wayward birds from their territory.
Every year the Hays nest is visited by at least one unwelcome eagle, said Bill Powers, owner of PixCams. The Murrysville-based company, who works with the Audubon Society on the webcam has been streaming the Hays nest since the 2014 breeding season.
Brian Shema, Audubon’s operations director, remembered one year when one of the eagles chased a visiting eagle, “screaming at that bird all the way up the Monongahela River.
“These younger birds, juveniles and sub-adults between nine months and 4.5 years old don’t have established territories,” he said. “They are nomadic and they are out there surviving.”
The visiting bird could have been curious and was looking for scraps of food that remained in the nest, Shema said. This episode at the nest could be a teaching moment for the young eagle to learn something about nest construction, he added.
The visiting eagle looks to be about 3.5 years old and will reach maturity next year, Shema said.
These young birds are brown, beige and white before they acquire their signature black-and-white coloring between the age of 4 and 5 years.
This type of intruding behavior is well documented for young bald eagles who are not sexually mature and are out “cruising and will cross into territories of established birds,” Shema said.
Bald eagles, like other birds, protect their breeding territory and nests from competing birds.
In the past, some observers have theorized that these immature eagles could be the offspring of the Hays couple visiting their old home.
Since the Pennsylvania Game Commission stopped banding bald eagles years ago and the birds are no longer endangered, it’s impossible to tell where they came from, Shema said.
There are more than 300 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the state producing young birds each year and those juveniles can show up just about anywhere in the region.
