Interesting reply below:


I’m an Erie County raptor expert specializing on red-tailed hawks and a master falconer. I’m very familiar with the Dutch Tavern bald eagle nest. It’s a remarkable story.
 
The nest structure you saw was a local attempt (of which I played no part) to lure the pair back to the area after the nest was blown out of the tree last year. Unfortunately, the platform is very wide and flat, with only a moderate ring of sticks. It would be a very fine osprey nest platform, but bald eagles prefer a much deeper, V-shaped crotch arrangement. Consequently (as I privately feared), the pair failed to return to this site and claim the new structure.
 
Instead, the pair has built a new nest less than a mile away, right in a tall tree in a suburban front yard. And lest anyone think the normal activities of the household and neighborhood will disrupt nesting, that’s not likely. In fact, this same pair nested in a tree in a residential backyard less than a half mile away a number of years ago, before it retreated to the Dutch Tavern cottonwood where it nested for a number of recent years. 
 
The most remarkable chapter in this story are the behaviors of the fledgling eaglets several years ago, when the nest was in the suburban backyard. In June, a local Erie MetroParks ranger was called to the site by a resident, claiming that three bald eagles were jumping up and down on the owner’s backyard trampoline. “Sure,”said the ranger. “I’ll be right over.” He hung up and started laughing, got in his cruiser, and headed over to the nest site.
 
The caller was correct. One eaglet was jumping up and down on the trampoline, with a sibling perched patiently on the trampoline rim, awaiting its turn. The ranger was able to get photos of all of this, which I can provide. 
 
As the ranger, a friend of mine, walked incredulously back to his patrol car, the third eaglet then landed on the service light bar across the cruiser, which was also photographed.
 
This is Ohio’s, of not the world’s, most urban-adapted pair of bald eagles. They are likely to raise young in the new front yard nest as successfully as any robin.
 
–John Blakeman





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