03 Mar Witnessing The Birth Of A New Bald Eagle Family

We have been fascinated for the past several weeks as we’ve watched a very special bald eagle family from Hanover, Pennsylvania, build their nest in preparation for their new family. This is our second year, witnessing the birth of a new bald eagle family and we are in love!

Catch the Live Feed

The Pennsylvania Game Commission has partnered with HDonTap to provide us with a live feed so that we can enjoy watching the eagles’ activities day and night, using night vision! I can’t think of a better way to get the children engaged and learning about the habits of these awesome birds than by watching them this closely!

Interest-Based Learning Rocks!

Since Clark and Luci were so enthralled with the eagle family, we decided to do a study of them in our homeschool. This is one of our favorite things about homeschooling – when we find something that we’re excited about, we can pursue it to our hearts’ content!

We started our study with a long nature walk at a local nature preserve. Although the goal was mainly to enjoy the outdoors, I gave Clark and Luci the task of finding birds’ nests. They were to take note of their details so that they could draw them once we returned home. We found plenty of nests of all shapes and sizes.

Nature Journaling

When we got home, Clark and Luci sat down to draw the nests as they remembered them. These kids absolutely love drawing, so they put a lot of time into their work. I’m not too sure that the results looked much like the nests that we saw on our walk, but there’s no accounting for the bright, vivid imaginations of children, is there?

Clark’s nest was an eagle’s nest, full of hatching eggs and dead fish, caught from the pond below the tree. I love his whimsically curled branches, flowers and snails! Luci also drew an eagle’s nest. According to her, the Mommy eagle is sitting on the eggs and the Daddy eagle can be seen below, catching some food from the pond. Some little birds are flying by, saying “Peep!” She proudly presented this to our homeschool co-op group with the entire description.

As Clark and Luci drew their pictures, I read them stories and information about eagles. As I read to them, I noticed them incorporating the new information into their pictures.

Hand Silhouette Eagle Wings

Our next project (because craft time is never done unless we’ve cut and glued something!) was to create a bald eagle out of construction paper. I drew the different body parts for each of them. They cut hem out, including two silhouettes of their hands to be the eagles’ wings.

We learned while drawing that once bald eagles are about 4 years old, their heads and tails become white. So we made sure to cut out a white head and a white tail. We also learned that an eagle’s wingspan can be about 6 feet. We made sure the wings were spread really wide, even going off the background construction paper!

Here is Luci’s finished eagle. Pretty majestic, wouldn’t you say? She did all of the cutting and gluing herself and is pretty proud of it!

Now get yourself over to the Hanover eagle cam – they have 2 eggs that should be hatching soon!