Bob Anderson: The first baby’s hatched now and you can see how kind of inept and clumsy this young bird is. She doesn’t quite know what to do. That baby’s begging for food, and yet she’s not fully responding to it, yet, there’s food off to the right in the nest. And these first few days were so painful for us. If it wasn’t for the male, I don’t think the babies would have survived.

Narrator: The eaglet is too exhausted to beg.

And now the mother starts to feed herself. Parent and young are failing to connect.

Suddenly, the mother focuses on her chick, as if seeing it for the first time.

Anderson: She doesn’t know just how to approach and she’s trying to ball up her feet.

She just like stepped on the baby there. It’s a lot different than a hard egg.

This shot here just really surprised us. She had her tail facing into the wind, the winds gusted to 40 miles an hour. The wind actually literally blew her out of the nest and she almost took the baby with her, something an experienced bird would never do.

Narrator: It’s been a trying day… and the stakes are only going up.

Anderson: Here’s our young female just standing up, and, as you can see, we’ve got our second baby – that it did hatch. And again, you can see that she’s getting a little bit better with her feet. You know, already there’s been a little bit of learning, I guess, that’s taken place.

Now the old man will come in, the guy that’s so proven. That’s him on the right. She’s stepping off now.

Here’s the adult male. He’s clearly fed babies before. And he just walks in and just... he’ll put the food right in that baby’s beak after one or two tries. He’s very experienced.

Narrator: And patient. It will take the eaglet a little practice to actually get something to eat.

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