Wedge-tailed Eagle - Breeding and Habitat

Breeding and Habitat

Wedge-tails are found throughout Australia, including Tasmania, and southern New Guinea in almost all habitats, though they tend to be more common in lightly timbered and open country in southern and eastern Australia.

As the breeding season approaches, a pair of Wedge-tailed Eagles will perch close to each other and preen one other. They also perform dramatic aerobatic display flights together over their territory. Sometimes the male dives down at breakneck speed towards his partner. As he pulls out of his dive and rises just above her on outstretched wings, she either ignores him or turns over to fly upside down, stretching out her talons. The pair may then perform a loop-the-loop. The wedge-tailed eagle usually nests in the fork of a tree between one and thirty meters above the ground, but if there are no suitable sites, it will nest on a cliff edge.

Before egg laying, both birds will either destroy the large stick nest or add new sticks and leaf lining to an old nest. Nests can be 2–5 metres deep and 2–5 metres wide. The female usually lays two eggs and are incubated by both sexes.After about 45 days, the chicks hatch. At first, the male does all the hunting. When the chicks are about 30 days old, the female stops brooding them and joins her mate to hunt for food.

The young Wedge-tailed Eagles depend on their parents for food for up to six months after hatching. They leave only when the next breeding season approaches.

Read more about this topic:  Wedge-tailed Eagle

Famous quotes containing the words breeding and, breeding and/or habitat:

    Good breeding and good nature do incline us rather to help and raise people up to ourselves, than to mortify and depress them, and, in truth, our own private interest concurs in it, as it is making ourselves so many friends, instead of so many enemies.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    Civility, which is a disposition to accommodate and oblige others, is essentially the same in every country; but good breeding, as it is called, which is the manner of exerting that disposition, is different in almost every country, and merely local; and every man of sense imitates and conforms to that local good breeding of the place which he is at.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
    William James (1842–1910)