Update at 8:35 a.m. ET, April 7: It hatched! There's video here.
Update at 12:15 p.m. ET, April 6: If you're just tuning in, the "Eagle cam" zoomed in on the third egg a few moments ago, and there appeared to be the start of a crack. Then mom settled back down on it. So there could be a hatching anytime now. We've added the line "third egg to hatch soon?" to our headline.
Our Original Post:
A pair of bald eagles and their two (soon to be three) offspring who live atop a tree in Decorah, Iowa, have been watched in recent weeks by about 11 million people thanks to a webcam set up by the Raptor Resource Project, a nonprofit organization that works to restore and protect the Midwest's population of falcons, eagles, ospreys, hawks and owls.
What is it about this show that attracts so many viewers?
"This is a positive," project executive director Robert Anderson told All Things Considered host Melissa Block this afternoon. "Everybody, when they log on they go 'wow.' ... It's just good to have something positive" to watch with so much bad news in the world.
And something quite positive is likely to happen in the next day or so, Anderson says: the hatching of the third egg.
More from their conversation will be on ATClater. We'll add the as-broadcast version of the interview to the top of this post later.
This is the third year that the project, with support from Xcel Energy, has had a webcam trained on the nest and streaming on the Internet. Here it is (there's a short ad at the start).
Some folks have also been having having a bit of video fun. The mother eagle has become known to some fans for her "shimmy" when she settles down in the nest. Here's a mashup video called Decorah Eagles - Dueling Corn Husks (The Decorah Shimmy).
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