A Tale of Lost Love, Mistaken Identity, Courageous Single Parenting – And Bald Eagles

Nara Schoenberg

In the middle of an asphalt parking lot, atop a dead pine tree, lives a bald eagle that has endured real-life plot twists worthy of the steamiest soap opera.

The female of the Mooseheart bald eagle pair, already a local celebrity in the western suburbs, was presumed dead after an eagle was killed in a May 29 car accident. Fans watched anxiously from outside the grounds of the Mooseheart Child City & School, where the eagle and her life mate had built their hulking nest.

Would the remaining eagle, thought to be the male of the pair, feed the two hungry eaglets, who were still too young to fly?

Would the eaglets even survive?

“We went down to watch every night after work, and the first couple of nights we never saw the parent feed them,” said Dave Soderstrom, a freelance photographer who has documented the drama at the Illinois Birding Network Facebook page.

“The parent spent almost all of its time flying down the river, up a little higher than normal, in big circles, like it was looking for its mate. It was really sad to watch,” he said.

Even at a time when eagles are doing well in the Chicago area, with 35 nests in the six-county region, the Mooseheart eagles stand out due to their decision to build their home just 50 yards from a fairly well-traveled road. During prime viewing season, more than a dozen cars of eagle watchers can sometimes be seen parked outside the school. Wildlife photographer Gordon Garcia, a retiree who lives in Bartlett, said he has photographed the birds about 1,000 times.

Soderstrom, 60, of St. Charles, also has taken thousands of photos.

The Mooseheart eagles were enjoying a successful breeding season, during which they shared both hunting and egg-sitting duties, when an eagle was struck by a car a few miles from the nest, at Orchard Road and Oak Street in Aurora Township. Cathy Pollack, a biologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said a woman saw an eagle swoop down in front of a car, apparently diving for roadkill.

After the car drove on without stopping, the woman saw the eagle had been injured and was lying in the road, Pollack said. The woman used her car to block traffic and shield the eagle, and the bird was still alive and holding up its head when police came. One of the North Aurora police officers who arrived on the scene told Soderstrom that he tried to comfort the stately bird, picking it up and rubbing its back.

The eagle folded its wings, put its head down on its chest, and eventually closed its eyes, Soderstrom said.

“People were really sad when they heard. I got (messages) from people who were crying about it,” he said.

The eagle’s body was taken to the National Eagle Repository in Commerce City, Colo., where Native Americans can request feathers for religious uses.

Pollack said it’s unclear whether the driver of the car that hit the eagle even knew that he or she had struck the bird. To purposely kill a bald eagle is a crime, she said.

For three days after the eagle’s death, Soderstrom and his friends closely watched the surviving eagle, which they believed to be the male due to factors such as the bird’s relatively high tolerance for human activity. It’s fairly easy to distinguish the male and female in an eagle couple when they sit side by side; the female is about 25 percent bigger, Pollack said. But with a lone eagle, it can be difficult to tell.

On the third day after the eagle’s death, a photographer got video of the surviving eagle bringing the eaglets a fish, and Facebook followers rejoiced.

The discovery that the surviving eagle was likely the female, not the male, came when local photographers began looking more closely at their many photos of the eagles, even blowing them up to observe the details. Subtle differences, such as how far back the beak extended, indicated to many of the longtime eagle watchers that the survivor was the female, Soderstrom said.

In yet another soap opera plot twist – some eagle watchers have suggested the saga should be titled “As the Eagle Turns” – a second adult eagle appeared on the scene about a week ago.

Intent on protecting her young, the Mooseheart eagle squawked at the interloper and chased him away. But the other eagle, who appears to be a male, returned, and returned again, and the female began to respond more favorably, Soderstrom said.

“The other night, it flew in and they actually flew together,” Soderstrom said. “They weren’t right next to each other, but they were kind of following each other for a while.”

Pollack said that based on a Facebook description of the birds perching in the same tree, the visiting eagle could very well be a suitor.

A lone eagle will in some cases pair up with a single parent and help raise the other parent’s young, she said.

But at this point, it appears that the Mooseheart eagle is doing fine on her own. Well-fed and rambunctious, the eaglets are hard at work practicing their flying skills, Soderstrom said.

“They flap their wings and they kind of jump up and down, and they get some air,” he said. The eaglets, who are big but a bit disheveled, without a mature bird’s pomp and plumage, will get a few inches of air, then a foot, then 2 feet, before falling back to the nest.

“We’re really happy to see they’re almost ready to fly,” Soderstrom said. “One of these days, we’re going to go there and we’ll see them in a neighboring tree. That could happen any day now.”