Fort Worth Star Telegram by Mitchell Willetts 12/28/2023
Sitting on a rock, resting for a moment under the West Texas sky, something in the distance caught Craig Hensley’s eye.
A massive collection of sticks piled on stone, a nest hidden in the side of a cliff wall towering over the sand and scrub of the Chihuahuan Desert — it was a bald eagle nest, he told McClatchy News, but not like any he’d ever seen.
“That nest, I mean golly … that’s the biggest nest by far that I’ve ever seen in my life,” Hensley told McClatchy News in a phone interview.
Unless they decide to abandon it, bald eagles will often return to a nest year after year, adding more material to it each time, making it bigger.
“I would love to know how many years that thing has been there,” he said.
A biologist with the state Parks and Wildlife Department’s Texas Nature Trackers program, Hensley was on a staff retreat at the Devils River State Natural Area when he and fellow team members spotted the occupied nest, he said.
“I’m guessing a few people could sit in the thing, I’ll tell you that,” Hensley.
But he wasn’t content to simply guess at its size. After doing some math, using the average size of a bald eagle as a point of reference, he estimates the nest “is about 15 feet across.”
If accurate, that would make the bald eagle nest one of the largest ever recorded in the U.S.
Currently, the record belongs to a 2-ton nest previously discovered in Florida, according to the National Audubon Society, which measured 8 feet across, or 7 feet less than the Devils River nest. However, the Florida nest was also 18 feet tall.
More:
https://news.yahoo.com/massive-eagle-nest-spotted-west-210838376.html
