Hello Everybody! Greetings from the Tambopata river, in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon! Hope you had a great start to 2018 and that you are enjoying watching the latest videos we are releasing from our harpy eagle family. In the last blog, I told you I was going to talk about the harpies from different perspectives, so today I’ll focus on a relevant question that actually every follower is interested in and asking: is Elpis, the harpy eagle chick male or a female?
Harpy eagle on a branch by Arturo Bullard
Well, nobody knows exactly why yet, but a couple of hypothesis are the most supported:
So, this is the reason why the male, Baawaja, is smaller than the female, Kee Wai.
We cannot know for sure, but take a look at the image below. That’s Elpis appropriating the prey that Dad brought (the video will appear later on) and you can notice that Elpis is at least the same size, if not slightly bigger than Baawaja.
Bawaaja and Elpis in the nest by Rainforest expeditions
Considering that our juvenile is still 6 months old, judging by size alone, it seems likely Elpis is a female.
Also, our team here at the lodge, the guides, the staff, and us, the biologists, can recall the size of the previous chick, Jupiter. He never got bigger than Baawaja (Dad) - that's how we knew he was a male. This comparison makes us even more convinced that Elpis is female, although we still cannot prove it 100%.
Finally - let's look a bit at their daily life. Elpis is getting more and more confident. Every day jumping and flapping her wings to become stronger, which allows her to fly properly.
This confidence is not only on a physical level but also in terms of behavior. Stay tuned, as we will see in the next video Dad delivering what seems to be a two-toed sloth and Elpis taking the dead body under her claws and protecting it in the same way Mom used to do in the past, with an aggressive display towards Baawaja.
We think that the harpy eagle chick, Elpis, learned that behavior from mom and is getting prepared to confront the new challenges of the forest on her own.
Things are changing up there in the nest. Even Mom and Dad appear to have changed roles again because we haven’t seen the female mother, Kee Wai, in the videos for a couple of weeks.
Perhaps she is taking a break after having been in charge of 80-90% of chick feeding since the hatch (but remember that during the incubation period dad was the one delivering prey for both Mom and Elpis).
What could be happening? Regular duty- shift? Short break? Mom coming at night when we have our camera off? We will figure it out the next weeks when we finish analyzing the videos of the last month.