Hanover bald eagles near fledging: Video traces their lives from egg to today.
The eaglets hatched from their eggs on March 20 and 21, and the eaglets are now within a few weeks of the three-month point in their lives, the point at which young bald eagles usually start flying.
If all continues to go well, when the eaglets leave the nest they will mark the ninth time that the bald eagle pair at the nest monitored by viewers around the world on a web cam that live streams through the Pennsylvania Game Commission website have fledged eaglets.
The pair usually fledge two eaglets per year.
The nest near Hanover is one of more than 200 nests with growing eaglets in them across the state.
The commission does not believe that decline reflected an actual decrease in the state’s bald eagle population.
The much larger number of bald eagles in Pennsylvania today also could be contributing to lower counts because new pairs might build their nests between existing nests of other pairs and thus go undetected.
The bald eagle population has grown and spread across Pennsylvania to the point that most of us now live within a few miles of some likely spot for viewing the big birds of prey.
After ending decades of devastation of bald eagle populations by organochloride pesticides like DDT, water pollution and shootings, which brought the birds to edge of extirpation from Pennsylvania in 1983, the commission began a reintroduction program of hacking eaglets from protected platforms at sites like Haldeman Island in the Susquehanna River near Duncannon.
By 1998, Pennsylvania was home to 25 pairs of nesting bald eagles.