43 ~ When you thought you’ve seen it all…

Extraordinary.  Just when I thought I’d seen everything on this 880 acre patch of woods and fields...

Two notes of background:

~ With spring unfolding, I’ve been thinking about the bears my housemate Jeff ran across last summer. Wondering where they denned for the winter, and if mom would soon emerge trailed by a new cub or two.  With trees and shrubs still in their bare gray dormancy, and thus good visibility deep into the woods, I’ve been keeping my eyes open with these warming days.

~ Second, the late nesting bald eagles have probably not made it. In the last few days I noticed that mom was off the nest, no longer incubating (and it would be far too early not to be constantly brooding young chicks if the eggs had hatched).  Perhaps her new beau, the new mate that replaced her hubby that died of lead poisoning this winter (see post #35), is a bit young and fired blanks. Hard to know, other than she’s had a roller-coaster 2021 so far. She’s still been hanging near the nest, looking a bit disoriented and unsure now what to do with herself.

Well, looks like she found something. Driving home yesterday afternoon, my eye was drawn to some commotion low in a tree not far from the nest.  It was a bear cub – being fed by the eagle!!  My brain could barely make sense of it, but there it was.  Mama bear was snuffling around, not too perturbed, beneath the tree where little junior had climbed up about 20 feet.  And on the same large limb where the wee cub sat was the bald eagle, clutching in her talons a dead prey that looked to be a large brownish bird (probably hen pheasant or hen mallard). She was tearing off bits of flesh, offering them to the cub, and he was accepting and eating them!!  In all my years of watching wildlife…

All I can think of is that a young black bear cub like this is roughly the same size and same color as a fledgling eaglet.  And when it went up a tree within view of the nest…  Mama eagle got her frustrated maternal instincts confused, and found an outlet for them. 

I watched them through my binos for about 20 minutes, exchanges of food continuing intermittently the whole time.  Would be a great image for American-Russian détente! The cub then made his way back to the ground (pretty funny watching him learn that climbing down is trickier than climbing up), and he(?) and mom ambled off through the woods, more or less parallel to the road – and the eagle followed with the prey!  It flew from tree to tree in their wake.  She apparently still had an urge to feed junior, but wasn’t comfortable coming down to the ground near mama bear (no mistaking her for an eaglet!).  In the days ahead it will be interesting to see, now that the eagle and cub have formed this positive bond (‘I get to feed someone’ and ‘I get fed’), if there will be more of this.

This is remarkable, and pretty much unheard of, as far as I can tell from some initial research (all that’s online are some examples of aggressive interactions between bears and eagles). Of course, there are known instances of things like pairs of loons raising orphaned ducks, or housecats getting friendly with pet rabbits. But nothing quite like this that I can find thus far (if anyone knows of anything similar, let me know).

I have some photos and video (not great, but good enough – pretty far away, with just my iPhone).  Sent some of it straight away to CNN late yesterday, and they responded that they are probably going to do a story, and asked that for the moment I not put any of the imagery into the public space, until they either run the story, or decide not to (the photos above I pulled from the internet).  So watch this page (or CNN)!

Well, yet another measure of hope for 2021 – if bears and eagles can get along (bears and Packers might be a bit more challenging), surely we can, too.