It’s a sublime wildlife moment broken by a battlefield explosion.
A female bald eagle perches on a snag near the Stearns Lake nest where she and a partner had successfully raised eaglets for years. She keeps a wary eye on a red-tailed hawk, just arrived on a branch even closer to the nest — turns out the hawk had chosen a bad time to scope out the neighborhood.
Because that’s when the nest explodes in a fireball worthy of a Hollywood stunt. A lightning strike, captured by a wildlife camera pointing from 500 yards away, disintegrates the eagle nest and leaves both the eagle and the hawk dangling upside down in an electrocuted stupor.
Boulder County Open Space officials and longtime eagle observers have never seen anything like the Aug. 6 fireworks at Carolyn Holmberg Preserve. They were equally surprised by the next few minutes of video: The eagle suddenly flaps her wings and drops to another branch to shake off the explosion, then flies away.
“I couldn’t believe that she survived,” said Dana Bove, a Colorado attorney and volunteer with the nonprofit Front Range Nesting Bald Eagle Studies, which keeps track of nesting pairs at local open space.
Parenting eagle pairs stick together for years, and often build new nests this time of year close to their most recent abode. The recovering eagle and her partner have been spotted by volunteers and Boulder County officials looking for nest sites and scouting for prairie dog snacks from light posts at Monarch High School and the old StorageTek complex.
Now Boulder County will close a trail at Carolyn Holmberg Preserve starting Oct. 15, for months if necessary, to give the eagle pair the space and quiet they need to rebuild near the exploded nest. This year’s eaglet had long since fledged and gone its own way, Bove said, but the parent eagles are now behind schedule in preparing for next spring.
Bove would like local officials to go even farther in supporting the eagle pair and other nesting raptors that hunt in the Rock Creek corridor and near Stearns Lake.
Developers are digging up prairie dog towns that provide more than half the eagles’ diet, Bove said. And observers have seen the disrupted pair search out a new snag and consider a building spot, Bove said, only to see them scared off by a passing bike rider or hiker.
Open space and land use officials can do better, Bove said, “if you’re going to value these birds that are still federally protected, and if you don’t want to drive them out of an area.”
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