The saga of Big Bear's famous bald eagles has entered a strange chapter, LAist reports: while Jackie fights for her life in a raptor hospital, her longtime mate Shadow is carrying on at the nest, and entertaining a visitor.
Where things stand
Jackie, attacked by subadult eagles on July 12 and found grounded, remains in critical condition at the Ojai Raptor Center. She has had a blood transfusion, and veterinarians have ruled out lead poisoning as the cause of her illness, though, as the center has been careful to note, her exact diagnosis is still unresolved.
Back at Big Bear, Shadow has done what a surviving eagle parent does: kept up the nest and looked after the pair's two eaglets, Sandy and Luna, who have recently completed their first flights. That part of the story is reassuringly ordinary. The part drawing attention is the newcomer.
The visitor
On the Friends of Big Bear Valley livestream that made Jackie and Shadow famous, Shadow was seen socializing with a different, younger female eagle, one that, unsettlingly, could be among the subadults that attacked Jackie. To a human audience that has followed this pair for years, it reads like betrayal, or grief, or a soap opera playing out in a pine tree.
Why the human reading is probably wrong
Here the reporting does something useful: it brings in an expert to check our instinct to narrate. Lori Arent, assistant director at the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, gently dismantles the idea that Shadow is pining, or scheming, or doing much reflecting at all. "Eagles don't have a reflective mindset to ponder this kind of question," she said. Shadow, in her assessment, is not wondering where Jackie is; he is responding to immediate needs.
The timing helps explain the visitor, too. Arent noted that mating hormones are not active this time of year, so Shadow's tolerance of the young female likely reflects lowered territorial behavior now that the fledglings are independent, not the start of a new pairing. In other words, the drama the audience sees is mostly the audience's.
Why we cover it anyway
It would be easy to be superior about this, to note that people are projecting a human love story onto a bird and leave it there. But the projection is the point of why so many care. Jackie and Shadow's nest cam turned a pair of wild eagles into characters hundreds of thousands of people check on, and that attention is not nothing: it funds rescues, it drives interest in raptor conservation, and it is the reason Jackie got a same-day rescue and a blood transfusion at all.
So the honest version is both things at once. Shadow is not grieving in any way a human would recognize, and the people watching him are not foolish for caring. Jackie's fate is still unknown, the raptor center has said it expects updates in the coming days, and the Herald will report whether the eagle so many are pulling for pulls through.
