Jackie the eagle and her mate, Shadow, are movie stars. They are bald eagles with millions of adoring fans peeking into their lives via a nest cam in Big Bear Valley, California.
Over Easter weekend, the pair’s second clutch of eggs of the season finally hatched to reveal two fluffy gray miracles—adorable bald eaglets—on live camera. These are, in a sense, angel babies since the pair’s previous clutch was eaten by scavengers in January.
The newborns were celebrated by fans online, who posted about the cute siblings’ mealtime frenzies and about how Jackie and Shadow showered them with tender attention. The nest cam’s operators, the nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV), also cheered from behind the scenes.
“We are overjoyed and filled with happiness for Jackie and Shadow,” FOBBV media manager Jenny Voisard told The Epoch Times. “Jackie and Shadow are amazing parents and great teachers for us all.”
“This has been a season of many ups and downs,” she added.
The bobble-headed eaglets appeared healthy in nest cam footage as both Shadow and Jackie took turns delivering ripped up pieces of fish to eager young beaks. At times the fearsome and majestic parents looked so gentle in their acts that their parental bond was unmistakable.
The celebratory event follows a tragic loss in late January when Jackie laid an egg that “didn’t look right.” Through the nest cam conservationists zoomed in and found a crack in one egg. The FOBBV community then watched online in horror as a tragedy unravelled.
“Jackie and Shadow were gone from the eggs for several hours, which was uncharacteristic of them,” Voisard said. “We don’t know if something deep down instinctively, in Jackie or Shadow, caused them to be away from the eggs.”
What she does know, however, is a raven sensed something and swooped to the nest a couple times. Could it have somehow sensed the crack? “It was kind of heart-pounding for everybody to watch,” Voisard said. “The egg was cracked, and so they started consuming it, and started consuming both.”
It was “very sad and devastating” for fans, she added.
In the normal course of mating, eagles will lay only one clutch each year, but it’s possible for a female to lay a replacement clutch when disruptions occur. Jackie wasn’t done laying just yet.
“It takes a month for her hormones to reset,” Voisard said. It took both eagles a few days to deal with what happened before getting back to bonding and mating, carrying in sticks and fluff for soft bedding, rebuilding the nest as if in ritual.
In February, both fans and staff celebrated the arrival of two new very healthy eggs that would become this latest pair of eaglets. A pair of pips, the starter hole created by the chirping chicks, appeared weeks later. Finally, Easter weekend marked a fruitful end to mating season for the couple.
Observing the safety of bald eagle eggs was one of the reasons for installing the nest cam, Voisard says. The project began in 2015 when FOBBV staff were concerned about a number of failed bald eagle clutches in recent seasons and decided to set up a camera overlooking a well-known nest that had been built prior to Jackie’s arrival on the scene, before she moved in.
“Eagles are expert nest-builders. They architect and engineer nest, they know what they’re doing,” Voisard said. “So if they can take over a nest that’s already existing, they may take that opportunity, or they will certainly build their own nest.”
Voisard wasn’t FOBBV’s marketing manager at that time but was in corporate communications. However, watching the Jackie and Shadow via the nest cam nurtured her through a period when she was unwell, and she realized she wanted to work for FOBBV too.
“I feel very lucky because of how important watching Jackie and Shadow is for other people, because some people can’t experience nature, can’t see this,” she said. “Or maybe they’re always working or they live in a city, or they’re healing from something.”
Watching the eagles full time made her realize how distinct their personalities are. They can get downright comical at times.
“They’ll tell each other what do do a little bit when they’re rearranging stick, which is funny,” Voisard said. “[Shadow] also likes to incubate the egg, and when Jackie comes to relieve him, sometimes he pretends she’s not there because he doesn’t want to get off the egg.”
Last September, however, FOBBV’s efforts to conserve the valley hit a major setback when a new development, which they had been fighting since 2022, finally got approved. That could mean a new luxury marina and housing on a strip of shoreline near where Jackie and Shadow hunt.
“Right now our organization is trying to fight that,” Voisard said. “We are running a fundraiser to raise money to try to buy the land so that we can permanently conserve it.”
In June 2025 she finally had a chance to set foot on that land. Watching the eagle pair via nest cam is great, she said, but seeing them hunt in person is priceless. She saw Sunny and Gizmo, the bald eagle chicks from last year, flying overhead and even saw Shadow make a catch.
“He caught a fish,” Voisard said, adding that the moment felt “spiritual” and “just so cool.”
“Everybody was so excited and taking pictures and clapping,” she said. “It was really fun.”
