The Eagles Of Decorah

[Narrator] Decorah, Iowa. Population 8,000, plus some world famous bald eagles.

This picturesque corner of Iowa is where one man's relentless promotion of raptors met a perfect match. Bob Anderson spent years developing research among a pair of bald eagles in Decorah, Iowa. From documentaries to the World Wide Web stream of an eagle nest, Bob's work opened hearts and minds to the comeback of an American symbol. But few escape nature's wrath, including the eagles of Decorah.

[Bob Anderson, Exec. Director, Raptor Resource Project] Nest collapsing is bald eagle biology. All bald eagle nests eventually collapse. They add about 200 pounds of sticks to their nest every single year. So after ten years that's a ton of nesting material. And in this case it is a Cottonwood tree where the limbs are known to be pretty fragile. So that nest could come down tomorrow, it could come down in five years. There's no way for us to call the shots on that. And the reason why they came to that tree where they're at, their old nest collapsed.

I don't know if it's a danger but it's a perpetual worry in Bob's brain. It really is. It's constantly going through my mind what happens when the computer goes down or what happens if the next collapses? It's really out of our control and I have to tell myself that but I stew about it and I do worry about it.

[Narrator] Bob Anderson's concerns met realty in the summer of 2015. A microburst of high speed wind surged through Decorah, Iowa. A massive section of Cottonwood trees snapped. The nest, watched by thousands online, tumbled to the Iowa soil. The nearly decade long experiment to showcase Decorah's eagles was seemingly over. But Bob's band of helpers hatched an experimental plan to resurrect the nest. Within days of the collapse, Bob approved the plan, but then fell ill. He would die only days later, leaving his dream in doubt.

His life's work and the efforts of dozens more would mark the beginning of a new chapter for the eagles of Decorah.

Funding for the Eagles of Decorah is provided by Friends, the Iowa Public Television Foundation. And by the Gilchrist Foundation, founded by Jocelyn Gilchrist, furthering the philanthropic interest of the Gilchrist Family in wildlife and conservation, medical care, the arts and public broadcasting and disaster relief.

(Text on screen: 1998, Near the Mississippi River)

[Bob] So this area is very prominent, it's also a pretty large rock and it's in the just immediate proximity of all the historic cliffs where the peregrine nests both in Minnesota, Wisconsin and in Iowa. And then also because it's so wooded I don't think we'll have predation by great horned owls. This does not appear to be great horned owl habitat. So it just, for that reason it just appears to be a safer place to launch off some birds and get them to survive.

[Bob] We have a really wonderful scientific opportunity here. We're starting with ground zero. We're creating a population from ground zero. It's a wonderful, unparalleled scientific opportunity.

[Narrator] Bob Anderson spent much of his career nurturing raptors, like the peregrine falcon in the 1990s. He spent decades slowly building towards the goal of reintroducing the falcons to the cliffs of the upper Mississippi River.

[Bob] I want to know if anything happens to a bird. I want to know if we're going to have any predation on the birds, if any were killed by a great horned owl or if any were killed by a mink. If we could just monitor them for the first maybe 72 hours once they're released that's the critical time. This is kind of the culmination of about 20 years of dreaming, a lot of help from a lot of people and friends we finally have falcons that are going to be released on a cliff on the Mississippi River and try to create a true wild population. It's the final goal and it's a needed goal and a necessary goal of peregrine recovery.

[Narrator] His work was a resounding ecological success story.

By 2005, Anderson and wildlife cinematographer Neil Rettig has turned their collective attention to the comeback of the American bald eagle. They zeroed in on a nest near the Iowa DNR fish hatchery in Decorah, Iowa.

(Text on screen: 2007 - Decorah, Iowa)

[Neil Rettig, Wildlife Cinematographer] They actually will take road kills. And one day I saw an eagle near Decorah come down and take what I thought was a woodchuck or something off the road and I thought, wow, if we can document that, that would really be cool. These guys do it on a regular basis. We've seen them take rabbits off the road and squirrels and actually fly up to the next carrying a rabbit that might weigh three and a half pounds. It's unbelievable.

The unique thing about this nest is that it's right across from the state fish hatchery. All the fish hatchery guys, they laugh about it and they think it's kind of cool that they see them go down and take the trout once in a while. This particular location is awesome because these birds are totally used to people on lawnmowers, barking dogs and I can sit here without being in a blind, standing right here, and the eagles will behave totally normally. At first when I looked at this female I thought there was something kind of funny about her head, but then I noticed when I got this long lens on that she was missing an eye and to me that makes it even more remarkable that she is so successful at hunting and taking fish because a raptor has to have depth perception and without two eyes it's just staggering that she can be as successful as she is.

Sometimes I don't even know how I can do this because I've sat in blinds for as long as fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours. Sometimes I've slept overnight in blinds. And with animals like eagles, it can be boring. For example, the female here has just been sitting for six hours, he hasn't done anything. So that's the toughest thing. If you don't have patience you may as well forget it, it's not going to work.

[Narrator] Rettig would film segments of the PBS Nature program from his perch near the hatchery. Together with Bob, they built a nest camera to document the eagle family. The next year the camera became a live feed destined for global stardom.

[Bob] Last year we had 78,000 unique computers logging on from 130 counties and I thought that was incredible. This year my web master, Amy Ries, was able to send a 24/7 feed to Ustream, it's almost like watching live TV, and it has gone viral. I'm really hoping that we've got sites from every country on the planet, that's my hope is every country on planet Earth is logged on. But it is right now with over 100 million total views it's the most watched video stream on the internet.

[Amy] People talk about how technology separates us but if you look at this, technology and the eagles really brought everybody together. So there is also kind of that feeling of cohesiveness and community among people who watch it and that's also important to them, it is one of the reasons why it gets sort of super fans.

[Bob] It has probably been the best wildlife education tool that I could have ever imagined. People don't understand what the cruelty of nature and the wonder of nature or the fact that a few weeks ago we had seven inches of just slushy snow and both the adult male and the adult female came in and were sheltering the babies and was powerful, powerful. So this has really done, I think it's really educating a lot of people about really what's going on in the circle of nature when it comes to wildlife in all aspects of wildlife. It's a huge, huge learning tool and that is really good, it really is.

(Bob sits inside looking at two computer monitors with another man.)

And then this one switches to infrared at night, IR, which is the night before last they were coming and going all night long. So contrary to what people know, bald eagles are nocturnal. So nobody knew that before, it has never been published.

[Bob] We have learned that the eagles are often flying and coming and going in the middle of the night and that's an unknown, even though we thought everything was learned about the bald eagles, to learn something new and plow new ground is really kind of exciting. We learned that the males will sometimes even bring food in the middle of the night. And then by being able to zoom in sometimes we've actually seen the egg hatching and just how it's breaking up, just in nature in its rawest, purest form. And really that's the driving force of the Raptor Resource Project to be an educational tool. And this is a science curriculum in many school rooms throughout the world.

(Bob sits inside looking at two computer monitors with another man.)

[Bob] So we also had a raccoon last night.

[Man 1] In the nest?

[Bob] In the nest, yeah.

(Night vision camera view of an eagle in the nest. Eagle feeding two babies.)

[Bob] I get calls sometimes from people in nursing homes that they just can't wait to get out of bed in the morning and go to the community room so they can log on to their eagles. And I even got an email from a woman that said, my husband and I quit talking, for ten years we don't talk at all, but whenever we boot up the computer and look at the eagle cam we talk like we're newlyweds. This eagle cam touches many people in many different ways besides being a wonderful, wonderful educational, environmental education tool.

[Amy Ries, Raptor Resource Project] I know that people sometimes turn to the eagle cam when they're going through difficult experiences in their own lives. So we have people who are sick, people who are very elderly who can't get outdoors, so the cam is really important to them as a window on the world. It's a way that they can get outside their own lives and experience something else. We have people that are just feel really compelled by the eagles and they just love to watch them and it's really very important to them. To them it's like stepping into something different and learning about something new.

We do hear a lot of concerns about cold and snow, especially when they lay eggs, because sort of everybody's idea is that if an egg gets too cold, even for a little bit, the developing embryo, the bird within will immediately die. That's not the case, but it's not a fear that goes away. So people worry about that a lot. Decorah Police Department or the Fire Department told me they got a whole lot of calls about please getting something up in the tree to shelter the eaglets from the weather. So that was one we heard quite a bit of.

[Brett Mandernack, Eagle Valley Nature Preserve] We've seen eagles covered with snow in a snowstorm when they're sitting on eggs. Most people probably wouldn't have any idea that eggs can survive that. So quite a learning experience.

(Wind blowing)

(An eagle sits in the next nearly completely covered in snow. It shakes its head and begins to move, the snow covering it begins to fall off. The eagles ruffles its wings, clearing the snow.)

[Narrator] After years of providing a 24/7 web stream, Bob was ready to bait his way into the next chapter of research on Decorah's eagles.

[Bob] Actually it began last year when people would ask me, what happened to the babies from last year? Where are the babies? Where did they go? And I couldn't answer that, I really couldn't. So working with Brett Mandernack...

[Brett] Having a long association with Bob and knowing what each other had been doing for many, many years, he knew of my eagle tracking and so we decided to team up and put a transmitter on a fledging and start to answer that question.

[Bob] Well, actually the last couple of days have been quite interesting. We thought for sure that we'd just catch one right away within the first few minutes. So yesterday was a humbling experience, it really was. It was obvious the birds didn't like the strings and the chords so we had to change options. This year, today we changed things. We got rid of the strings and we trained them to come to a closed bow net yesterday and so we were a little bit more confident.

Well, we used two different types of trapping methods. One is an old Indian method called a pandam. That's what we actually use to catch the bird. It's a ring about 30 inches in diameter, a hoop ring with large nooses on it and then we tied the trout in the center of it, of the hoop. And so the eagle actually had to walk in through some nooses to get at the trout and when it walked through the nooses it immediately got caught. As soon as one of the eagles came in, E1 came in to eat the first trout then she just ran down, was caught in the noose immediately.

(Three men run over to catch the eagle, then put a hood on it.)

[Bob] It was a huge relief off my shoulder when I was able to grab the leg of that bird because I knew once I got a hold of that leg I knew we were home free, I knew we were going to get a transmitter on it and so I immediately became elated.

(cheering)

(Bob and his team measure the eagle.)

[Bob] 34.

I'm going to go with 16.9.

Cool.

That one's not even necessarily full grown at this age.

[Bob] This is the first eagle that I've caught and put a hood on and put a band on and put a transmitter on. Now, unlike Brad, Brad has had a lot of experience over the years working with probably 70 or 80 eagles I think I heard him say. That's a lot compared to my experience. My experience with eagles has really been putting cameras in their nest and following their behavior and Brett has been doing a lot of satellite research data for many years.

[Brett] Good. Okay, now we're going to have to put it on her belly most of the time because these go on the back.

[Bob] Okay, I'll just hold her for a little bit here while you get ready.

[Brett] We're pretty much ready if you want to roll her over onto her back and kind of prop her up like this, Bob.

[Man 2] Yeah, a lot of times it's kind of best to work from behind if you can grab her feet and flip her up like this and rest your elbows on the table there.

Hold her while you do that.

[Bob] Like this, you mean?

[Brett] Whatever, we'll work around you. You go ahead, you need to be comfortable because you're going to be sitting there for a while.

[Brett] You're blocking out that sense of sight. What they can't see can't hurt them and they just get much more relaxed. It's all visual, very much visual, with bald eagles and a lot of other birds. So if you block the visual aspect of things the bird does just calm down tremendously. Some people don't use hoods and you can do it without hoods, we've done it without hoods, but I find it's a lot better, especially when you have a bird that may be nippy, if you put a hood on. Then your fingers don't get punished quite so much.

[Bob] I wonder if we should just tape her feet.

[Brett] That's what we're going to do.

Try to put a little cloth between there.

[Bob] Really?

[Brett] Yeah, just a layer between so that she doesn't clench herself.

Since we're going to be working on the back, this is why the big hands are helpful when he's startled. Just kind of prop her like so. We can get access to the front, to the back because we're going to be running our strings across the chest eventually here too. So we're going to pull this wing out and just check and make sure everything is good under here, we've got all the feathers out of the way. If we can get a couple of fingers under there that's kind of a good thing. It seems to keep the feathers from being preened up over the solar panels and it keeps it charged. At least that's the theory.

[Bob] Absolutely perfect. She's just sitting perfect. Just think if we didn't have a hood how bad this would be.

[Brett] That's why we don't do it without hoods.

But we do have to pull the wing out on straps, under the wings and all, so we do have to manipulate the bird a little bit. We have to, there's a Teflon harness has a cross on the chest that we have to stitch.

Make smaller stitches than we practiced, not that it makes a different up here, but on the crisscross where they could get a toe in the bigger stitch, just make them a little tighter. Put a stitch in there and we'll glue the end with a little super glue to keep the Teflon ribbon from unraveling and give it just another little layer of adhesion.

I've seen such variation in eagles and some of them will want to bite your face off as soon as you're grabbing them, others just lay there and look at you. Some of them just don't struggle at all.

[Brett] In essence, the Teflon ribbon is a very long-lived, it's a durable material and it will be on that bird for sometimes its whole life. I tracked one adult bald eagle for seven years. So I know they last at least that long.

Let me know when you're ready.

[Bob] Go ahead.

I'm going to set it right here.

(Bob sets the eagle down and it flys away.)

[Bob] Excuse me, here comes our baby right here with the bird on it, with the transmitter on it right there flying. I can see the transmitter on her back with the naked eye. A huge relief, I mean a huge relief. This was just, wow! So many people have worked so hard to get to this stage, it just took months and months and months of work but it came about.

[Brett] She was fascinating to say the least. The first year was pretty much as expected. It left Decorah in August and went up around the point of Lake Superior in September and kind of turned around and went back into Wisconsin, hung out there. What happened after that was pretty surprising.

[Bob] Well, we do know that a lot of young eagles tend to go north. That's just the general trend. And this last summer when she went to northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota nobody was surprised. But for her to set off for the Arctic and cover it in just a few days and be a thousand miles, she's closer to the North Pole than she is Iowa right now. That's just amazing. A lot of people are really surprised. A thousand miles straight north up to Polar Bear Provincial Park on the Hudson Bay. What a surprise. I mean, all the eagle experts are surprised, I'm surprised. Who would have guessed that an Iowa eagle would be up in the Arctic?

[Narrator] Decorah's native eaglet would return to Iowa only months later.

[Bob] If she came back to this area to nest she'd probably stay here then year-round. But right now she's a wandering bird, she's young. She doesn't have a territory, she's too young to breed, she's kind of a nomad.

[Narrator] That fall, Bob set out to track down his nomad eaglet, still equipped with a transmitter and fresh off its return flight back from Northern Canada.

[Radio] 2-2-9.

[Bob] I'm thinking, yeah, we're within, we're real close to her right now. I should switch the antonator.

[Narrator] Stopping on county roads in northeast Iowa, Bob constantly triangulated the eaglet's signal. Until finally discovering D1 in the bare trees above a nearby cornfield.

[Bob] It's an exciting day. It's always nice when you get a signal and makes it even better when you finally get to track down the bird and confirm that we see the transmitter on the bird's back. To actually get a signal like an hour ago when we got the first signal I get a little bit giddy almost. And then as the signal strength increases you just kind of, you know that you're getting closer. And so it was a little bit difficult today, it really was, but we finally cracked it and got her. It's incredible, it really is.

[Bob] Every day I get up and the Argos data comes in at six minutes after six in the morning, it's like opening a Christmas present to see where D1 is and where D14 is and it really is, it's just fascinating. And then to plug those coordinates into Google Earth or Arch GIS and just take a good look at where the environment is. And so it's fun, it really is, it's great, it's exciting.

[Narrator] Bob Anderson's excitement was contagious. Volunteers from northeast Iowa and as far away as Massachusetts built a network of help around the raptor resource project team and the eagles of Decorah. All of it was encouraged by a lifelong Iowan, Willard Holthaus, whose land across the street from a fish hatchery became the command and control center for 24/7 eagle broadcasts and point of inspiration for everyone involved.

[Willard Holthaus, Lifelong Resident of Decorah, Iowa] I was pretty surprised to see an eagle trying to build a nest that close here.  It was pretty interesting for awhile while they were doing it and then they had their first baby. It was an interesting situation. They explained everything what they were going to do and I thought it was a good thing and I thought it was a way of giving back to the community since I lived around here all my life. And I think everything is working out good on both sides and all the sides.

[Dave Kester, Board Member, Raptor Resource Project] I wish I would have been a sociology grad student when we started this because we were in it to first make the documentary, American Eagle, and then what we could learn with the cameras in the nest, being able to watch them 24/7, but what we've seen from human nature falling in love with these, they watch them for an hour and they have become their eagles. They forever keep watching them and it's worldwide. It blew me away. The town loves them. And in a practical sense they love what they do for the town. The people that are coming in, I tease when I meet some of the people who travel here, including David and Ann Lynch who are now helping one of the new board members, they travel from the East Coast, and when they would first come here I would tell them, do you know how many eagle nests you drove past to get here? But the people have to come see their eagles. And when this thing blew up people all around town, you ask any local town member, I can't go anywhere without anybody saying oh, Decorah. It used to be Nordic Fest.

[Bob] It has been a great financial boon to Decorah and it has really, truly put Decorah on the map. People know how to spell it and pronounce it.

[Ann Lynch, Volunteer, Raptor Resource Project] I never thought that a particular pair of eagles would mean so much to me. It has even brought my husband and I closer together, it has really kind of cemented a bond that we didn't know we had, we had but we didn't know we had, and I think it has really brought us to a point where we just want to do more for folks. But, again, it has really cemented my belief in people, in humans, so to speak, when every day you look at the news and the news is full of such bad news, but boy this is just all feel good stuff. So to me it just brings hope.

[David Lynch, Board Member, Raptor Resource Project] The bald eagle is only native to the United States. So people around the world get to see something they might not ever see in person.

[John Howe, Director, Raptor Resource Project] You have to remember that these people that have been watching, most of them have been watching for year on year on year. So this is a tradition for them to watch these eagles each year.

[Willard] There was a lady here that come from, used to come from Hawaii that stayed for a couple of weeks and she went back home and UPS'd us a pineapple from Hawaii when she got back. So that was pretty nice of her.

[Ann] We just met two folks, two wonderful ladies yesterday who were here from Illinois, one woman who was really ill over the winter and she said the camera really saved my life. She said, I was in bed, I had some grave illnesses, I was not feeling well, life was looking so bleak for me and to watch the nest on the TV, watch on a computer rather, the eagles and the chicks, she said it really saved my life. She said, so I had to come here and see them for myself. And we were so thankful that the adults were here yesterday and flew over and fished for her so she could see it. And this was just something she needed to do.

(Eagles chirping)

[Willard] Their food, yeah, it has been a good buffet for them, I think that's probably a big reason why they stick around here.

(Eagle flying fast with a fish clenched in its beak.)

I saw one of them carry a hind quarter of a fawn, a deer, up there with just the leg sticking out. He had the hind quarter he was going up to the nest with. They have carried a lot of different things up there.

[Narrator] From documentaries to the World Wide Web stream of an eagle nest, Bob's work opened hearts and minds to the comeback of an American symbol. But few escape nature's wrath including the eagles of Decorah.

[Bob] Nests collapsing is bald eagle biology. All bald eagle nests eventually collapse. They add about 200 pounds of sticks to their nests every single year. So after ten years that's a ton of nesting material. And in this case it's the Cottonwood tree where the limbs are known to be pretty fragile. So that next could come down tomorrow, it could come down in five years, there's no way for us to call the shots on that. And the reason why they came to that tree where they're at, their old nest collapsed.

[Narrator] Bob Anderson's concerns met reality in the summer of 2015. A microburst of high speed wind surged through Decorah, Iowa. A massive section of Cottonwood trees snapped. The nest, watched by thousands online, tumbled to the Iowa soil. The nearly decade long experiment to showcase Decorah's eagles was seemingly over. But Bob's band of helpers hatched an experimental plan to resurrect the next.

[David] Immediately several of us said, it might be a good idea to try to build a manmade nest. It has been done before by a couple other organizations, we know there's one organization in Canada that has been successful at doing this. Not only for the eagle cam, I think for the benefit of the cam, but also for the benefit of the area, keeping the eagles here. It's a great area habitat-wise for them to be in and it's a very safe area.

[Amy] It's not like it has never been done before. There is literature on doing it and people have done it successfully. But I think people because they're engaged in this and they're part of the story they were really excited and interested about what would happen next. So it's not sort of a hypothetical nest that somebody built once that they've never really heard about, this is their nest and these are their eagles.

[Narrator] Within days of the collapse, Bob approved the plan, but then fell ill. He would die only days later, leaving his dream in doubt. His life's work and the efforts of dozens more would mark the beginning of a new chapter for the eagles of Decorah.

[David] One of the things Bob Anderson did before he passed away was he connected all of us as a group of people.

[John] It went really quick, memorial celebration of life service for Bob, the next week was planning and building and we were basically hatching that plan and figuring out what the details were going to be right after that knowing how serious that was. We've got a window of about August and September that we are able to get up into a nest and do work in it. So we knew that we had just a little time window.

[Neil] Right before Bob passed away we came up with an idea, I couldn't sleep one night and I came up with this brainstorm, why don't we rebuild a nest either in a tree, in the same tree, because I didn't understand the tree completely severed off, and then I ran it by Bob and about five days later he called and this was when he was quite sick and he said, oh this is an awesome idea, we've got to do it. And so he was so excited. I thought, well we've got to do it, we've got to carry on Bob's dreams. And so we're here today. The original nest, which is right in these severed trees behind me, blew down in some enormous wind that came through, oh I don’t know, it was about two and a half, three weeks ago.

This is the original nest too that came down in the storm. This is the tree, you can see the great, super crotch that they chose, it was a good site. The tree looks solid. You can look up and the tree is three big branches broken. So you can see the event that happened, the trees are not rotten and you see the sides, this is still a young nest.

[Neil] The process, well first involves finding a good crotch, a good branch configuration that's going to hold a nest. And we want to make sure that there's easy flying access from the eagles coming and going. And it happened that we found this almost perfect branch configuration and it turned out to be quite close to the site of the old nest.

Pull a climbing rope up, go up and then build the foundation which consisted of four two-by-fours bolted onto the tree.

And then we put kind of a bag of mesh, filled that with nesting material and just started adding sticks.

Almost like making a giant Christmas wreath.

One stick at a time until we got it to where it is now and it's looking like an eagle nest.

[Neil] There has been eagles, artificial nests made and eagles have occupied them. So it's not an original idea, it's the first time we've ever done it. I've done it with red tail hawk nests to attract owls for filming purposes and things like that. So this is a first time for me. But I think it is a darn good chance it will work. Because Bob did it we're going to do it just kind of as a ritual but we're going to put in a couple of dead squirrels up there and sometimes Bob after climbing up and installing the camera he'd leave a treat for the eagles, either a dead squirrel, a rabbit or maybe a fresh trout from the fish hatchery. So we're going to do that today. If Bob was here right now he'd be jumping up and down. We'd probably all be celebrating with a couple of beers afterwards. He would have been happy as hell.

[Howe] And then hopefully wait to see if they came and I think it was the last week of September that we were finishing up the camera work, we put a couple of trout from the trout hatchery up into the next and by about half a week they turned into trout jerky and then we saw like early October I think it was like a Monday or a Tuesday mom came after the owls. We also had some great horned owls in there kind of looking over the nest to see what they thought and eagles got in there and they pretty much claimed it and really started building that nest right after that, early October they started bringing branches in and they built that thing up several feet and several feet in diameter.

[Amy] That was such a feeling of accomplishment. It was so, I say it's a feeling of accomplishment but it's the eagles that came back, but it was just like this was everything that we hoped for.

[Narrator] The eagles began adding sticks to their nest. Preparing for winter. And waiting patiently for egg laying season.

In the waning days of February, the mother eagle even had to fend off a pint sized intruder who disturbed her slumber. But this mouse is unlikely to make the same mistake again.

By mid-February, the first egg was laid. Four days later, egg number two was visible. And three days later egg number three was seen worldwide on the Decorah eagle nest camera.

For the volunteers and members of the Raptor Resource Project these fresh eggs in the manmade nest were a moment of relief, quickly followed by anxious anticipation. The first hatch would come one month later after even more ice and snow.

In late March of 2016, wildlife cinematographer and the brain child behind the manmade nest, Neil Rettig, got a call from John Howe, the new director of Raptor Resource. The day they had been waiting for had arrived.

(Text on screen: March 29, 2016 - Decorah, Iowa)

[John] Alright. Let's just take a look at mom there. Beautiful shot.

And they have just built this rim up around here. Everybody has just been going crazy because we can hardly see in there, very rarely. Just this morning was the first view as far as I know. Although we had been tracking the crack and the hole in the egg now for two days. She's hovering a little bit more. They do that once a chick, an eaglet is actually hatched, she'll kind of sit more as an umbrella cover over them and won't sit down quite as tight to the eggs as she had been. So I was figuring it would be more towards the middle of when the three had been laid, they're almost exactly three days apart for all three chicks.

What do you think? Look at this! You're a papa!

Look at that! This is our first real good shot.

(A tiny white, fluffy eaglet is shown on the computer monitor.)

[Neil] He might actually, look at this --

[John] We'll see if there's any possibility of feeding. I'm not sure.

[Neil] Incredibly powerful talons around that delicate little baby, the way she's blowing him off is awesome. Look at that.

When I got there the news I actually started to cry.

[John] I know you told me that.

[Neil] It was so emotional because this is like the culmination of a lot of dreams.

[John] It is.

[Neil] For Bob.

I can't believe it.

[John] Look at that.

[Narrator] The first hatch of the rebuilt nest was a reminder of why the online camera became such a draw, and not just from Midwestern viewers.

[Ann Lynch] What magic is that to be able to see into the world of nature right at their own level and watch it every minute and wait for that egg to hatch and wait for those little feathers to come in. And are they going to get fed today? And then oh my gosh, there's an emergency, someone is close to the edge of the nest. It was mesmerizing, the best reality TV we had ever seen because it was real.

[Narrator] David and Ann Lynch are a perfect example of online observers turned super fans and then volunteers, both gravitating to Decorah, Iowa, from their home state of Massachusetts.

[David Lynch] Started watching and soon after that I contacted the Raptor Resource Project and started helping them online from Massachusetts with education and Facebook and things like that. And in 2012 I made my first trip out here and became involved with the project. Still building our eagle population out East and one of the things I do with my wife is we're avid photographers. So the place to find eagles of course is the Mississippi flyway. So you come to where the eagles are. Every year my wife and I come and we spend a lot of the summer here photographing, meeting fans, working with the project. The moments we concentrate on is them actually grabbing the fish from the hatchery and fishing. It is one of the few places on Earth where a photographer can actually sit and not move and take pictures of eagles that close while they're actually capturing their dinner.

[Narrator] As the eagle family continued their journey, a second egg would hatch. As the days passed into weeks, the Raptor Resource team knew the inevitable, the third egg would not hatch.

[John] And this was the first year since these eagles have been tracked that one of the eggs did not hatch. So we looked at that, we know the biological reasons, either it didn't get fertilized or something happened during the development of that eaglet inside that egg that did not continue.

[Narrator] The only chance they might have to learn more about the third egg would come six months later during a September window to climb up to the eagle nest. But long before that, the Raptor Resource Project would call up an old friend to continue a banding and tracking program vital to eagle research.

[Brett] Well, there are many questions to be answered yet. D1 sparked a lot of interest. The fact that she flew where she did. Is this atypical? One bird, you never know. So you try to want to get more transmitters out there to see if that was an aberration or if that may be fairly typical. We also want to look at sibling dispersal. Do siblings from the same nest travel together or independently? So that was something we are striving to learn more about.

[Narrator] In summer 2016, both Decorah eaglets would be fitted with transmitters. Within months, Brett discovered one of the eaglet's flight data was stationary on a rural highway. The eaglet was struck by a vehicle likely during a roadkill feeding. It's just one of the realities Brett has discovered with Decorah's eaglets. While some have explored the Midwest and Canada, others have exhibited high mortality rates from power poles.

[Brett] Well, Decorah is not your typical rural setting for a bald eagle nest, obviously, people all around and the birds are acclimated to that and to traffic and to all kinds of noise. And there are power poles everywhere. They're attractive perches, they're easy to access and they're everywhere. Your perspective of power poles changes a little bit after you have one of your eagles get electrocuted because you notice them everywhere around town and the whole suburban area where the nest is.

[Narrator] When the Raptor Resource team gathered in September, it was time to replace the nest cameras and bring in some climbing experts.

[David Lynch] The wiring is very complex and very lengthy. As you can tell we have hundreds of yards of wiring. That is what we're focusing on and hopefully the climbers focus on their job and don't have any problems.

My name is Kike Arnal. I'm from Venezuela in South America.

It's a pretty good tool, huh? This thing works great.

I was climbing eagle trees back in the day in the neotropics in Panama, the jungle and the Amazon. Trees are smaller here. These Cottonwood trees are beautiful but they are real fragile which is not very nice, they break, something that we climbers don't like very much to happen when you're up in the tree. But forest is forest, the forest in the neotropics is very different because of all the bogs and all the diversity of insects. And I think both forests are just spectacular.

Very efficient technique, the starting point you need a good set up of the rope.

(Like shoots a pellet with a rope attached up into the tree.)

We are trying to get more than one branch to get the line across. Why is that? Because if one branch for any chance one branch breaks and you're hanging from the rope then there's another branch that will stop you falling.

There again you do again the same knot that I did.

[Man 3] The first one?

[Kike] The first one you do it at the very end and tie it very, very strong.

[Man 3] I think that will do it Kike.

[Kike]Alright.

You pull it and I'm going to tell you when to release it.

[Kike] So you try to get high, you try to get a rope close to the nest. It can't be too far away because then how do you get access, get closer to the nest? It's impossible. It's actually super cool. The eagles, they managed to get this spectacular view of the surroundings. I guess this is very important for them to be able to see everywhere for all their predators coming to attack the chicks, for example, or owls, also a place where they can just dive and hunt. They can move very quickly. So in general any eagle nest that I remember has an incredible view.

[David] Usually in the beginning we wouldn't replace these cameras every year, we would wait probably two years. I think Bob was giving two to three years on some of the cameras as long as they were working. I think now the technology is changing so quickly that it's worth doing this work every year. We prepare, me along with my wife Ann and John Howe, we're preparing the electronics, the cameras, getting them set, making sure they work, wiring them, getting the wire out, making the wire ready to go up into an eagle's nest.

[John] These illuminators are 120 degrees out to the side. So there's, you can't miss it but if you can imagine a plane going out like this we want it going right at the Y branch. This is an omnidirectional microphone. Don't screw it too tight or it might strip and bust. Moving the cameras and zooming in at these opportune moments, I think that's the, it just almost sends a chill down your spine basically thinking this is so amazing and it's just, to be involved in being able to bring that out for people to watch and enjoy, being a part of that is amazing.

[Kike] He's going to go like that. You put it there you will be able to see the illuminator. It turns out you're going to see -

[Man 3] Will this be in view of the camera?

[Kike] We hide it but the illuminator has these large, it's infrared.

The key that he gave us for the microphone -

[Howe] That's actually one thing exciting about our maintenance activities that we're down here doing this week and that is that we are actually going to look into the nest and see if that egg is still there. We got that opportunity to take a look at that.

Nobody saw the egg being kicked out of the nest, it looked like it just got buried through the season.

[Kike] So you know what is important when we get to the nest, don't stand in the middle of the nest, so if that egg is there we don't compress more.

[John] The one on the right is the one, that's the one that they like to fly up and come up and sit. So I think we would stay off of that branch.

Main trunk that held the Decorah eagle nest, that fell down here and actually the nest landed here, actually part of the nest you can see some bones here, these could be squirrel, some smaller bones here.

[Kike] Now move this way.

[John] An egg is made to be pretty stable against compression.

[Kike] There it is!

[John] We see the egg.

[Kike] Whoa!

[John] It was down in there underneath.

[Kike] Whoa, great news!

[John] Great news is right!

We found the egg.

(cheering)

We want the bag up, it looks like it's fully in tact.

[David] I think what we're actually seeing here is something very special also because not many times in one's life you get to hold an eagle egg in your hand and have permission to do so. Our permit is allowing us to retrieve this egg today.

[Ann] Even just six weeks after they hatch and then they fledge those birds are pretty big and they come from this little egg here. So kinda cool. But it is pretty heavy and surprisingly to me pretty solid. You called it.

[David] This is the first time we've had one that did not hatch and we don't know why but maybe we'll find out.

Alright, let's transfer.

[Amy] That actually was a surprise to me because we haven't seen that before and we did get the egg autopsied and they found that it had never been fertilized. So I'm glad we were able to recover the egg. I wrote a blog about it after we got the report back and it was one of the more read blogs that I've done, over 26,000 people read it. So there was a lot of interest in why the egg didn't hatch.

[Narrator] For more than a decade, the eagles of Decorah have been chronicled through film and live stream, through rain and snow, and with a team of passionate supporters from across the country. As future bald eagle research still unfolds in this picturesque corner of Iowa, the goals of the late Bob Anderson continue.

My gut right off says he'd be really proud.

[Ann] I think he would be relieved knowing that it wasn't going to end with him. I think that was his whole purpose was to get as many people so passionate and excited as he was to carry on what it was that he worked 30, 40 years to do.

[David] Bob was concerned that Raptor Resource Project continue after he was gone. He always said, this can't end with me. And I think right now I hope he's looking down thrilled at what we're doing and happy. I think he'd be thrilled if he was here, he'd be thrilled at the new technology we have and the amount of work I think that everyone is willing to do.

[Willard] He would be very proud of everything that is going on here because John has really kept everything going and improving everything.

[John] Everyone here in Decorah knows Bob and knew him and a lot of the work that he did. So I think the big thing there is just, I think Bob would be happy with where things have gone here and the dedication to making sure that that continues. That was really one of the biggest things that I heard is boy, everyone in the Decorah area, everyone across the world who loves these eagles, we've got to keep this thing going.

[Narrator] Funding for the Eagles of Decorah is provided by Friends, the Iowa Public Television Foundation. And by the Gilchrist Foundation, founded by Jocelyn Gilchrist, furthering the philanthropic interest of the Gilchrist Family in wildlife and conservation, medical care, the arts and public broadcasting and disaster relief.