Decorah eagles take liking to man-made nest

DECORAH - Adoring fans are again watching the Decorah eagles online as the raptors put finishing touches on a nest built by human hands to replace their storm-destroyed previous home.

'It's been a really neat experience,” said John Howe, who succeeded Bob Anderson as director of the Raptor Resource Project after Anderson's sudden death July 27. 'The only sad part is that Bob wasn't here to be a part of it.”

Howe said Anderson was 'super excited” about the nest-building project, which longtime colleague Neil Rettig, an Emmy-winning filmmaker, suggested shortly after a July storm smashed the former nest and toppled the tree in which it had been nestled.

Anderson, who established the wildly popular Decorah eagle cam and led the effort to reintroduce peregrine falcons to the Mississippi River bluffs, authorized the nest rebuild as one of his last official acts.

The new nest, 70 feet off the ground in the crotch of a nearby tree, was intentionally left unfinished to appeal to the eagles' do-it-themselves instincts, according to professional photographer and climber Kike Arnal, who helped Rettig with the construction.

Arnal said building material consisted primarily of sticks from the destroyed nest, supplemented with lumber.

'It looks like the eagles built it. You would have to know where to look to even see the lumber,” he said.

'Mom and Dad,” as they are known to their legions of Internet admirers, began visiting the new nest about two weeks ago and started bringing sticks to it last week, according to Howe.

'Bob always used to laugh at Dad's insistence on having the last touch on any stick brought to the nest by his mate,” Howe said.

Before the eagles expressed interest in the new nest, Howe and colleagues installed new high-definition cameras and microphones to replace equipment destroyed by lightning.

Doing so, Howe said, was a 'calculated gamble” that the eagles would be attracted to the ready-made nest.

Though the eagles are not always near the nest, the cameras have been running around the clock for the past 10 days and will continue to do so, he said.

The new high-definition equipment yields a startling improvement in the clarity of both sound and images, he said.

Just in case ill luck should befall the new nest, Howe and colleagues have installed cameras and microphones on a backup eagles nest in north Decorah to ensure that Raptor Resource Project's educational outreach will continue uninterrupted.

The backup nest, he said, is one of the largest the raptor experts have encountered - 8 feet in diameter and littered at its bottom with the bones of deer and turkey.

See www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles to watch the eagles.