I'm glad you saw that, Beth - it was fun watching them discover that the food was big enough that they could both eat!
Mom brought a delivery at 11:25 am - as far as I could tell, it was mostly bones with a wee bit of meat, but Dee and Ess were happy to squabble over it and pull it back and forth. And Res was even willing to feed them a few bites, though I'm not sure if they came from the bones or something on the nest. I must admit I wasn't sure who it was at first - she's really moving well around the nest! But looking at the video slowly, I'm seeing the white stripes on her back, and her tail looked completely white.
And while I'm getting ready to save the video and take some screenshots to post, this seems a good time to discuss the possible gender of the two eaglets. Female eagles are almost always larger than male eagles, and Res is definitely larger than Sur when you see them side by side (the 4th picture here -
viewtopic.php?f=114&t=333#p109103 - shows that quite well). And by the time eaglets are ready to fledge, they are almost always larger than the same gender parent - so almost all fledglings are larger than their dads, and almost all female fledglings are also larger than their moms.
Dee and Ess are almost 10 weeks old, which is generally the beginning of the fledging window (though it's my impression that eagles in BC usually wait until they are 11 or 12 weeks old, and sometimes older - the normal fledging window is 10-14 weeks) - which means their feathers are still growing some, and they will probably get a bit bigger. I've been watching to see if one is getting bigger than the other, and so far I haven't see that happen (though it still could - males reach full size at a slightly younger age than females). Anyway - here's where I'm going with this....
Gemini sent David Hancock a link to one of her recent videos of Res on the nest so David could see the progress Res is making with her leg (he was very pleased with her progress!) - and he said that Ess looked like a female to him, and that Dee looked slightly bigger than Ess, so was probably also female - and he was amazed at how big they both are!
So - unless their apparent sizes change, I'm going to start calling both she for simplified sentence structure.
And as you watch the video - what do you think? Are they already as big as Mom?
Mom feeding Ess as Dee works on the bones.
Eaglets tugging on the bones.
This was as close as I could get to Res and Ess side by side - they move quickly! And Ess may be puffed up a bit in a mini-mantle to protect her part of the carcass.
Thoughts?
Res and Eaglets (2 minutes)