Central Pennsylvania’s newest reality show is unfolding 100 feet up a tree overlooking Lake Marburg.
Hundreds of thousands of people have watched a pair of bald eagles on the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s high-definition eagle camera in southwestern York County.
Every stick placement, every rabbit eaten and every egg laid in the nest has blown up social media feeds and overtaken workplace conversations across the region. Some viewers have even bestowed names on the area’s favorite flying couple.
But the eagles’ habitat isn’t a reality show; it’s nature at its purest. And nature, as some viewers have discovered, isn’t always pretty.
“There are no guarantees in nature, and that’s the reality of it,” said game commission spokesman Travis Lau.
So far, the York County eagles have thrived in their new nest, and viewers haven’t had to bear witness to anything more graphic than the occasional feeding.
Previous experience with an eagle camera in Pittsburgh, though, has prepared the state’s game commission for the public backlash that could happen if something painful happens to one of the birds or their eggs in York County.
The Pittsburgh camera streamed to more than 3.3 million devices when the commission set it up over a nest in the city’s Hays neighborhood in 2014, Lau said. It was an overall positive experience for viewers, with the two adult eagles fledging three eaglets from the nest by summer.
The only drama: a 10-second encounter one February night when a raccoon tried to raid the nest.
The adult eagle, which was sitting on eggs, attacked the intruder, and neither the eggs nor the raccoon appeared injured. But “almost immediately,” the game commission received calls and emails from viewers demanding the game commission get rid of the raccoon, Lau said.
“Our standard response has been that we’re not going to do anything to intervene,” he said.
The only exception, he said, would be if one of the eaglets fell from the nest or one of the birds was injured. Even then, Lau said, the commission would have to evaluate whether that bird’s life was worth the risk of scaring the adults from the nest.
Every eagle camera operator has probably dealt with the public cries for intervention, said Christine Reinolds Kozelle, director of news and editorial services at Berry College in north Georgia.
The college’s eagle camera is in its third year at the rural campus. More than 20 million bird-lovers have watched life and death unfold in the 100-foot pine tree in a “Keeping up with the Kardashians”-esque experience.
While most viewers understand that nature isn’t always a Disney movie, she said, they sometimes need a reminder.
“People who are new just aren’t informed on what’s going on in the nest,” Kozelle said. “The more information you can give people about the process and the eagles, it definitely helps.”
The Berry College nest has two eaglets that hatched Feb. 13 and 15, Kozelle said. Over the past week, the larger sibling has repeatedly attacked the smaller one, making him increasingly weaker and less able to compete for food.
“We got a lot of feedback on that. People were really worried of course,” Kozelle said.
Like the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the college’s policy is not to intervene. It instead tried to educate viewers by posting a PBS documentary about the behavior on its Facebook page.
“We don’t know the outcome of this sibling behavior, but we can tolerate it better if we understand it,” the college said in the post. “B4 (the larger eaglet) is acting completely out of instinct … the instinct to survive.”
Still, it’s easy for viewers to get caught up in the beauty of the eagle cam, as Kozelle and Lau have discovered.
Both the game commission and the college have refrained from naming their eagles to try to maintain an emotional distance between humans and wild animals, but that hasn’t prevented others from coming up with their own monikers.
The York County eagle couple has attracted names like Ed and Ethel, Richard and Mary and Freedom and Liberty, as well as a social media following. A Facebook group called Hanover Eagle Watch has more than 1,200 members, and a recently launched Twitter account provides satirical insights from the eagles’ perspectives.
And the public is always watching. The game commission’s camera has received more than 1.6 million views on 150,000 devices since it launched in January, Lau said.
Viewers have about an 85 percent chance of witnessing at least one of the eaglets successfully fledging from the nest, Lau said. But if something goes wrong – whether it’s a predator, siblicide or an aggressive parent eagle – the public, he said, needs to understand these kinds of events always happen in nature. The just don’t always unfold in front of an audience.
“As humans, when we watch animal behavior, we try to explain it through how we would behave. But that’s not always a good explanation,” Lau said. “In the natural world, it’s rough out there. It’s survival of the fittest, and we’re going to let that play out.”
