It’s called Cain and Abel syndrome. On a farm in Minnesota, a mother bald eagle feeds her newly hatched eaglets. The four-day-old female eaglet has turned on her smaller, two-day-old male sibling. Every time the mother feeds them, the older eaglet gets much more to eat. Her younger brother may not be able to hold on to life for long.
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Wow! Those eagles are as bad as humans!
When eaglets hatch (a clutch of 2 is normal), they hatch from 1 to 3 days apart, in order that the eggs were laid. for the first couple of weeks, there is a visible difference in size, but past 2 weeks, the size difference starts to equal out.
Also, bald eagles are dimorphic in the fact that the females are larger on average than males, so that gives them a little bit of a size advantage, even as nestlings. A female adult can be about a third bigger than a male.
If the little guy can make it past a couple weeks, he should be OK.
Last year at Fort St. Vrain Station here in Colorado there were 3 eaglets, when the 3rd one had hatched I was cheering ‘him’ on because he wasn’t able to get around well for a while and the other 2 were getting about all the food, I wasn’t sure if he was going to make it. At times I thought he didn’t. But he did, they all did. Towards the end, just before they were old enough to fledge, they even survived a tornado in the area. It was great watching them grow via Xcels’s webcam. This year again there is a clutch of 3. And we wait to see what happens.
when do eaglets hatch