HE HAS EAGLE EYES
TOM SCHRADER IS DOCUMENTING THE NESTING SEASON OF PARENTS MEGHAN AND HARRY FROM START TO FINISH
The female bald eagle sat, her white head like a pile of vanilla ice cream topping the brown stick nest outside of Hinckley, while her mate perched on a stark limb to the east as Tom Schrader and I set up to watch around 1 p.m.
‘‘They usually switch around noon,’’ Schrader said. Right on time, considering time changed Sunday.
A few minutes later, the female — dubbed ‘‘Meghan’’ by Schrader — stood up, shook herself, then flew off. The male — ‘‘Harry,’’ in Schrader parlance — circled with her briefly, then swung around and sat on the nest.
During incubation, eagle eggs need to be kept at 105 degrees. Both parents share nesting duties. The nest is along Little Rock Creek on a private farm near Hinckley. We were
watching from 150 yards away along a road.
Schrader named them with a nod to the Royals, the nickname of Hinckley-Big Rock High School.
‘‘The names have gained some traction,’’ Schrader said. ‘‘They are celebrity eagles now. I am not a big fan of anthropomorphizing them, but it does seem to give people pleasure.’’
It caught my eye Jan. 31 when he posted on Facebook: ‘‘This year, I’m making a concerted effort to document photographically the entire nesting season, from nest maintenance and construction, to the laying and incubation of the eggs, to the hatching of the eaglets, all the way through their fledging in the summer. It’s an ambitious plan but one that I think I can carry out.’’
I enjoy such quixotic quests immensely. What drew Schrader to the Hinckley nest is that he was so impressed by Meghan and Harry’s parenting skills last year, when they worked feverishly to hatch triplets and led all three to fledging. Triplets are rare in bald eagles, and rarer is all three making it to
fledging. He named the triplets ‘‘Huey,’’ ‘‘Dewey’’ and ‘‘Louie,’’ which seems more street urchin than royalty.
‘‘I visit the nest not quite every day but at least five times a week,’’ Schrader said. ‘‘I thought it would be a good thing to share with people.’’
I first met Schrader more than 20 years ago at an event around the removal of Hofmann Dam on the Des Plaines River at Lyons. He is a past president of Friends of the Fox River and still does a monthly blog for the group.
Schrader knows the pair well enough to know the first egg this year was laid Feb. 20 or 21.
‘‘I am expecting the first hatch March 27,’’ he said. ‘‘They are pretty much full grown in 12 weeks.’’
Schrader, a former dean at the College of DuPage who also worked with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, is retired. In retirement, he is an educational facilitator at Fermi Lab, which gives him plenty of time to observe and record the eagle pair.
Schrader uses a Canon R7 mirrorless camera with a Tamron 150-600mm zoom. His lens extender magnifies by a 1.4 zoom factor. Crop sensors give another 1.6 factor. So, effectively, he has 1300mm magnification.
This is probably the quirkiest thing he has done, though he also learned the pileated woodpeckers at Hoover Forest Preserve on the west side of Yorkville well enough to time them to certain spots.
‘‘Amazing what you can see if you have the time,’’ Schrader said. ‘‘I saw [Meghan and Harry] mate five times this spring. I see the changing of the guard on the nest.
‘‘That is my advice: If you have the time to watch, you will see so much.’’
Time? There’s a topic.
‘‘Do you have time?’’ Schrader asked. When I said yes, we set off to see the four nests that are in roughly an ‘‘L,’’ from the Hinckley nest east to the Big Rock nest, then south to view two nests off Eldamain Road.
We ended the afternoon at the lower Fox River observation platform at Hoover FP. On an unseasonably warm afternoon, we sat and talked more languidly than the Fox flowed.
Clouds of small insects hovered. I glassed mergansers diving on the Fox. A belted kingfisher rattled off. Somewhere, mallards quacked. Upstream, Canada geese honked. Surprisingly, no eagles flew. Nor did we hear or see the pileated woodpeckers he finds there regularly. People wandered by, then off again (Schrader is a familiar sight). We told wild stories, from muskies and walleye to eagles and ospreys to cougars and wolverines.
It was time.
I skirted urban sprawl on my way home, drifting south until I hit I-80, then goosed it.