Get ready to watch majestic bald eagles in a new Minnesota EagleCam

A reboot of EagleCam, a wildly popular window into the breeding lives of Minnesota bald eagles, is set to go live Thursday.

The new camera will live stream from a nest in the metro of a pair of bald eagles that have successfully bred and used the nest for at least four years. The Department of Natural Resources announced the news Tuesday morning.

“We can’t wait to see the story of the new pair of eagles on the new EagleCam unfold,” Lori Naumann told the Minnesota Star Tribune. Naumann has managed the EagleCam program for the Nongame Wildlife Program since the camera first went online in 2013.

Loyal EagleCam followers online anticipated the news with excitement. Friends of Minnesota Nongame Eagle Cam, a Facebook group, has more than 16,000 members, while the feed is known to draw hundreds of thousands viewers around the United States and internationally. The previous EagleCam, which followed the lives of an eagle pair dubbed Beau and Nancy, met disaster April 2, 2023, when the massive nest collapsed.

The 20-year-old nest was laden with snow and ice weighing an estimated 2,000 pounds before it broke from its rotting branch. The fall killed a single remaining eaglet and scattered the parents.

The camera perched above it, however, remained intact. The video feed was turned on periodically and captured the return of the two birds. The pair have flown around the territory, much to the delight of their Facebook followers, and produced young at another nest last winter. Electricity couldn’t be installed near the birds’ new location, the DNR said in a news release.

Viewership of the camera’s feed perhaps peaked in February 2023, a few months before the collapse, with the scene of one of the parents dutifully atop the eggs, up to its neck in snow during a blizzard. The Nongame Wildlife Program estimated 1.9 million people saw the viral image.

The new camera stream goes live Thursday at mn.dnr/eaglecam. The stream also will appear on the DNR’s YouTube channel at bit.ly/mneaglecamera. The original camera feed also will go live Thursday, showing the territory around the collapsed nest where the eagle pair has occasionally been spotted.