It was hard to see details within the nest through the viewfinder because of the distance and windy conditions, Wesley said. When he got home and uploaded the video to his computer, he was in for a surprise.
“I was so shocked I had to yell downstairs for Amy,” he said. “I said, ‘I think there are three eaglets, you need to come look.’”
In the video, two fuzzy little eaglet heads can initially be seen and then a third slowly rises up as Willa stands over them.
“It’s not very common to have three eaglets, it happens about 20 percent of the time,” said Jim Weller, founder of the Eastwood Eagle Watchers.
Weller and other eagle experts who have been keeping an eye on the nest had their suspicions. They had observed Orv and Willa making multiple deliveries of large fish each day.
Three hungry mouths to feed will be challenging for the eagle parents and adds to the potential of something going wrong. Even so, Orv and Willa are experienced parents, Weller said, and have “what it takes to get the three through.”
The nest will become very crowded in just a few weeks. The eaglets will be full grown by the end of May.
“If they are all females, you will have close to 21-feet of wing up there in that nest,” Weller said. “If you think about it, three, seven-foot wingspans trying to exercise and move about — they’ll be conking each other on the head.”
Orv and Willa have had two eaglets each year since their first pair, Flyer and Soar, were born in 2018.
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