Third eaglet hatches in Hays nest, keeping mom and dad busy finding food

With the arrival of the third and final chick Friday, the Pittsburgh Hays bald eagles are busy feeding their brood.

The harried couple feeds the hatchlings up to 17 times a day, according to statistics from last year’s breeding season from PixCams.

The Murrysville company partners with the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania to offer the free livestreaming webcam of the Hays nest.

The Hays eagles are in their 10th year of nesting on a steep wooded hillside above the Monongahela River near the Glenwood Bridge. Both parents will constantly warm and protect the young birds.

Overall throughout the nesting season, bald eagle parents feed the birds three to five times a day, said Sean Murphy, the state ornithologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

The PA Farm Country eagle nest cam just had a fourth egg hatch, he noted. “It will be interesting to see if these adults are up to the task of feeding a lot of young!” Murphy said.

Carp seems to be the favored fish for the Hays family, said Dan Dasynich, of Pittsburgh’s Lincoln Place. Dasynich is a longtime bald eagle photographer, moderator for PixCams eagle webcam chatroom and an avid angler.

The fish menu can “correlate with the spawning of a particular species when it takes less effort to catch,” Dasynich said.

Currently, the Hays pair has been bringing in a lot of carp, river redhorse sucker, sheepshead (freshwater drum), channel catfish, walleye, shad and bass.

They will bring small animals to the nest such as squirrels, rats and young opossums and birds, including gulls and Canada Geese goslings.