Hatched!

After last year’s trauma, it’s good news now: the Norfolk Botanical Garden’s (NBG) pair of American Bald Eagles have welcomed their first and second hatchlings!

Meanwhile, here’s what’s likely happening inside the third egg as that chick completes incubation and begins to emerge. One of the coolest aspects of all this is that, though the eggs were laid over a span of seven days last month, the eagles delayed incubation of any until all had been laid, which “[slowed] early embryo development, helping to compress the time between hatch dates” and eliminate any feeding advantage that the earliest hatchling gets.

View the goings-on at the nest over the spring and summer via NBG’s Eagle Nest-cam, linked in my blogroll.