May 16, 2012 - It's getting crowded at the Lafarge nest!

The youngest chick was three weeks old yesterday - and the oldest one will be four weeks old tomorrow - and all are growing very fast!

You can watch the Lafarge bald eagle nest cam by clicking on Live Cameras at the top of the page. 

Now that Tenas Chakchak, our eaglet at the Lafarge site, has fledged, we get to take advantage of the fact that the camera we're using has the ability to pan, tilt and zoom around the tree's neighbourhood.

The parents and Tenas have been in and out of the tree all day, and when in the tree they've been on any of several branches or up on the feeding platform.

Rather than trying to track them, a problem made difficult by the fact that the video is about 30 seconds delayed from the control inputs due to the network, we've put in place a program that visits several of the many "waypoints" that we've defined at fairly random times and in fairly random order.

The waypoints include vistas of the Vancouver harbour, North Shore and of course the Lions - the most famous of the local mountain peaks.

We'll leave this program running for the time being - chances are that you'll see one or more of the eagles on each cycle which lasts from about 1 to 5 minutes.

Thanks again to Lafarge Canada Inc. - they've purchased another camera and mounted it on their "sand tower" to the East of the nest tree. The current position is temporary while their machinist makes up a mount extension to position the camera more to the South and higher to escape another branch that has grown on this impressively surviving tree in their concrete yard on Vancouver's waterfront.

The fact this tree is growing so well is a tribute to the work Lafarge has done to halt the erosion around its roots and preserve it from further damage now that they have their plant on the property. The problem is that until we can get a camera mounted in the tree (hopefully after the chick fledges near the end of the summer) we have to rely upon looking through the tree's canopy at the nest. The original camera, situated on the newly installed feeding platform to the West of the tree, has been largely blocked by new growth and we can't get at it to move it until the eagles leave for the salmon spawning season.

The new Axis Q6032 camera should be operational on our site some time in the next few days - possibly before the mount has been changed. In the mean time I've pulled some still images from it to give you a flavor for the view it presents. You can see them in the Media gallery album and some slightly different ones in the discussion forum for this nest.

The Lafarge Eagles have had a remarkable day. This evening at about 7:30PM the second egg surprised us all by hatching! This hatch is only about 12 hours after the first hatch, which is a bit unusual. Nest watchers were there as usual and documented the event in real time. To read about it, check the Lafarge Discussion Thread