The nest is seen at 4:45 p.m. Friday. The Jordan Lake EagleCam allowed thousands to see two hatchings.
Thousands of people watched two eagles hatch in a nest near the top of a tree at Jordan Lake this week.
The moments were captured by the EagleCam, a camera mounted over the nest in late 2010 by a team of students, staff and faculty at N.C. State University. The goal was to show people that bald eagles have returned to North Carolina and are thriving.
Ted Simons, the biology professor who headed the project as a means of increasing public engagement with science, said the EagleCam has also been an experiment for using wireless methods to view wildlife.
The nest, a half-mile from the nearest power and Internet source, was rigged with devices that remain charged via solar power and are wirelessly connected to a router at a nearby home. The live feed was a big success with the public last year, when two chicks hatched in January and remained in the nest until they fledged in April.
Francis Ferrell, conservation biologist at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Jordan Lake, began streaming the video feed again last week, just days before two new eggs hatched Wednesday and Thursday. The new site had received more than 10,000 hits by late Friday, drawing viewers from Raleigh to Australia.
"We were overwhelmed, shocked and surprised that the equipment worked as well as it did," Simons said. "There was a very intense local reaction. We weren't expecting such a large response."
The camera looks down on the nest from above, and for long stretches it shows little more than one of the nesting eagles sitting and looking around. But there are moments that viewers crave, such as this week's hatchings or when one of the eagles brings a duck or fish to the nest to feed the chicks.
With a new Facebook page that has received more than 2,400 likes, Ferrell is confident that this citizen science project will become even more successful than last year's.
"We had the public recording their observations last year, but it was hard to get people to record consistently about the same things," he said. "This year, we've had them get more involved in running the press and Facebook page."
On the new site, viewers will find a chat window where they can meet other eagle enthusiasts and comment on the nest. Also new this year is a list of links Ferrell placed under the video feed, where viewers can find more information about the eagle, a link to the Facebook page, and information on local wildlife and weather.
Dink Suddaby, avid eagle fan and staff assistant at Duke University, says that for her, watching the Jordan Lake eagle cam has helped create a sense of community.
"I joined a Facebook group last spring to continue dialogue and camaraderie with people when many live cams were turned off for the season," Suddaby said. "Through this group, I met some fellow 'Eagle Peeps' at Jordan Lake on New Year's Day this year for a walk-about to do some eagle-watching."
While their venture did not uncover the nest viewed on the live feed, Suddaby said, they enjoyed watching a few of the other eagles in the Jordan Lake area. She said her favorite thing about eagles is watching how protective they can be while bringing food back to the nest.
