Have you ever gotten yourself in over your head when it came to a home improvement project? I once tried to scrub down the ceiling in my bathroom and ended up shorting out the lights. Another time, a well-meaning painting project ballooned into having to refinish the baseboards in three adjoining rooms. So my heart goes out to the poor bald eagle in this video. He was just trying to add a large stick to his nest, but he was clearly in way over his white-feathered head.
“DIY project gone wrong!” Reads the caption on this video from John Bunker Sands Wetlands Center southeast of Dallas Texas. What follows is a disaster of hilarious proportions as a male bald eagle valiantly attempts but ultimately fails to figure out how to add the new branch he brought home to the growing nest. Eventually, his mate, the female, loses patience and takes over the proceedings for him.
Related: Bald Eagle Couple Who Went Viral Building a Nest Welcome Their First Chick
Guess it needed a woman’s touch.
In the video, the eagle is seen trying to move the large stick out of the feathery center of the nest but getting stuck on the crossbars of the steel beam in which the nest is situated. As the mated pair of eagles attempt to work together to move the stick, they struggle to maneuver it sideways through the opening and at one point, one of the eagles even wedges their neck into a v-shape on one of the branches in a manner that appears quite painful.
Anyone who has ever accidentally banged their thumb with a hammer can certainly understand these birds’ pain. All they were trying to do was make a small adjustment and now look what they’ve gotten themselves into!
But, with perseverance, the two eagles finally manage to maneuver the branch to a reasonable location on the steel arm. After watching them do all this with only their beaks, I’m amazed that birds nests are as big and impressive as they usually are.
Bald Eagle Nests
Bald eagle pairs often return to their nests year after year, continually adding to it and upgrading it as the years pass. The bulk of the nest is built from large branches, and the inside is lined with softer materials such as feathers, moss, and grass. Bald eagles build the largest nests of any North American bird, and they can weigh as much as two tons, and can even kill the tree in which they are built.
Here, the eagles’ nest is in the steel arm of a tower built expressly for the birds and their nest, but the path toward its construction took a rather circuitous route.
Wetland Eagles
The eagles of this refuge were first spotted in the vicinity back in 2008, and first began nesting there in 2011. Unfortunately, the nest they built was on the arm of a nearby high-voltage transmission tower, a dangerous prospect that was a peril to these animals as well as causing a disruption in local electrical service.
To solve the issue, a group of organizations banded together to fund, build and move the nest and the arm it was built on to a replica tower designed specifically for those birds. In the past decade, it has been the breeding ground for eighteen successful eagle fledglings.
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