John Matthews and Kendra Yoshinaga
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON — (WMAL) It’s official now. The Eaglet has landed!
After nearly two days of waiting , the camera trained on the Bald Eagle’s nest at the National Arboretum showed a puff of gray feathers popping from the first of two hatching eggs at around 8 am Friday morning.
Shortly thereafter, the eaglet’s mother began coddling her chick.
The pair, nicknamed Mr. President and the First Lady, have been incubating the two eggs since mid-February.
The first “pips,” or cracks in the shell, showed up at 7 p.m. Wednesday evening. It took until 10 p.m. for onlookers to confirm that the line on the shell was, indeed, a crack instead of a stray piece of hay.
Julia Cecere, spokeswoman for the American Eagle Foundation, says it can take anywhere from 12 to 48 hours for an eaglet to hatch.
“It’s really on a per-egg basis,” Cecere says. “Sometimes eagle eggs hatch quickly; sometimes they get more exhausted and hatch a little bit more slowly.”
WANT TO SEE THE EAGLE FAMILY LIVE? CLICK HERE!
Mr. President and the First Lady take turns sitting on their eggs. On the live feed, the eagles have been seen rearranging the nest with their beaks.
“That’s a natural behavior,” Cecere explains. “They’re basically preparing the nest for a family. So we believe that when they’re doing that, they’re fluffing their nest the way a mom would clean the house when she has a new baby.”
“It’s usually pretty wet from the shell, so you’ll see it turn into a little sticky ball of cuteness. And then it’ll turn into a fuzzy ball of cuteness once it dries off,” Cecere says.
The proud parents have a busy weekend ahead: Eaglet #2, whose egg was laid four days after the first egg, is expected to start hatching over the weekend.
Copyright 2016 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: American Eagle Foundation)
