The Pittsburgh Hays juvenile bald eagles were sharing the skies with a young red-tailed hawk as they took their first flights recently.
“They just sort of sized one another up,” said photographer Dan Dasynich of Lincoln Place. Over the weekend, about a dozen photographers positioned themselves on the Three Rivers Heritage Trail along the Monongahela River to catch some of the first flights of the three juvenile eagles in the Hays nest.
Another photographer, Michael Pollice of Elizabeth, said: “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. To see their first flights in person is truly amazing. This will never get old.”
“Seeing them fly reminds me of their job completed,” Dasynich added.
The third young eagle fledged Wednesday. The first two flying siblings returned to the nest for a meal Monday, which was documented by a live webcam sponsored by PixCams and the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania.
The Hays eagle webcam was viewed by 2.4 million people in 50 countries this nesting season, said Bill Powers, owner of PixCams in Murrysville.
“We had another amazing nesting season with the Hays parents successfully raising three eaglets,” he said. “It is a direct tribute to the excellent health of the Mon River Valley.”
Rachel Handel, spokeswoman for the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania, noted that raising three eaglets hasn’t been easy for the Hays parents.
“As the young birds grow and eventually get to be as large as their parents, the amount of food that needs to be brought into the nest increases dramatically,” she said.
The juvenile eagles who have taken their first flights have larger flight feathers than their parents, Handel noted.
“It’s like having a pair of training wheels on a bike for the first ride,” she said.
After leaving the nest, the young birds still will spend time with their parents and cry for food. But they eventually will depart from their parents during the summer.
