Eagles, up close and very personal

I've been following the Decorah (Iowa) eagles on the eagle cam put up by the Raptor Resource Project.  They are nesting 80 feet up in a tree on Decorah Fish Hatchery property.  The camera shows eagle family life 24/7.  This project was conceived by Bob Anderson, who is a complete bird hero.  When he dies, he will be lifted up on the wings of a thousand birds, which is the dream of all of us bird lovers.  Bob Anderson has been instrumental in bringing back peregrine falcons in the mid-west.  But you can Google him and learn all of the details.
  I want to think about the Decorah eagles.  These mature bald eagles have been a mated pair for several years.  With the idea that we would be interested in watching eagle life, some very enterprising staff of the Raptor Resource Project (Bob Anderson again) climbed 80 feet up into the tree and installed a camera a few feet  above and to the side of the eagles' nest before they showed up this year. Of course, the eagles  have no concept of  'camera'. 
The eagles successfully brooded and hatched three young eaglets.  Right now they're not quite a month old, very fuzzy, dark grey babies, with just the hint of pin feathers coming in.  These will be the 'real' feathers that will mark them as young adults and enable them to fly.  We have watched through howling winds, snow, frost on the camera, you-name-it awful weather.  And as humans, we worry.  She has snow all over her! Why isn't she feeding that smallest one?  Isn't he squashing the third little guy, where is he anyway?  Do these big raptors really know what they're doing??  Then we see one of them (they're hard to tell apart: mom is bigger, but the camera is close and it's hard to tell them apart) oh, so gently offer a tasty bit of fish to one of the youngsters with a bill that can and does tear and wreak havoc on prey. Patiently, the parent leans down, turns her head and holds a bloody strip of something until the wobbly little one gets the idea and snatches it away.   When the wind blows, the parent gets busy and pulls hunks of the 6 foot wide nest in close, forming a deep pocket where the three little ones hunker down, with the parent as windbreak.  Not even a small feather is ruffled in the breeze.  They'll be just fine.
These camera are genius.  They pull us into the world of these creatures where we can watch, soap-opera style, as the family matures.  It's not always pretty.  It's nature, after all.  Sometimes a youngster dies, sometimes a parent does not return to the nest.  It makes us care and that is a good thing, as Martha says.  It's so much easier to ask people to help protect a species, or birds in general, when we have all watched their struggles and victories. We know them as our neighbors, which is just what they are.   Bird cams have proliferated over the past few years. There are hummingbird cams, peregrine cams, red-tailed hawk cams.  Just Google and you will find them.
At work, when things become surreal, I bring up the Decorah eagles for a moment.  There is the parent, sitting either on or near the eaglets, looking out over the land with her noble gaze.  Sanity.  Try it.