Bald eagles Jackie and Shadow keep checking on eggs — but experts say they won’t hatch

Bald eagles Jackie and Shadow have spent over a month building their nest, tending to their eggs and hunkering down through winter storms.

But now, after all of their hard work, wildlife officials say it’s likely these eggs won’t hatch, the Friends of Big Bear Valley said in a Monday, Feb. 27, Facebook post.

“I love these two and my heart just breaks for them. All the hard time laying on the nest through all this bad weather and never giving up,” one person commented on the post.

Jackie laid her first egg in the nest near Big Bear on Jan. 11 after two days of large storms, the nonprofit agency said and McClatchy News previously reported.

The eagle cam caught her laboring on camera after she began “puffing her feathers out.”

Then an egg appeared.

On Jan. 14, she laid her second egg in the middle of a storm, the agency said.

Bald eagles typically incubate eggs for about 35 days. But Jackie and Shadow have been brooding the first egg for 49 days as of March 1.

The nonprofit doesn’t know exactly why the eggs won’t hatch, but it has a few guesses.

The eggs could have not been fertilized or they stopped developing, the nonprofit said.

“Without seeing what was going on inside the eggs during each step of the process, we have no way to know what happened,” the nonprofit said in the post.

Jackie and Shadow will likely continue to protect the eggs for a few more weeks before giving up on them, the nonprofit said.

But there is still hope for Jackie and Shadow to lay more eggs, the agency said.

“If it’s early enough in the nesting season, eagles may lay another clutch,” the nonprofit said. “Jackie has laid eggs as late as March and had a successful hatching.”

Jackie laid two eggs in 2022, and one hatched. The fledgling named Spirit left the nest May 31.

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