As of Sunday afternoon, the long wait over Big Bear Lake had finally resolved into movement in the nest bowl. After days of peeping, cracking, and careful stillness, both eggs belonging to Jackie and Shadow had hatched, giving the bald eagle pair two new eaglets and their audience a moment weeks in the making.

The first chick emerged early Sunday morning. The second followed later that morning, turning Easter in Big Bear into the kind of wildlife moment that feels both intimate and widely shared.

That outcome mattered because this season had nearly collapsed in January. Jackie laid her first egg on Jan. 23 and her second on Jan. 26. Four days later, ravens breached both eggs after the nest was left unattended for a stretch, ending the first clutch almost as soon as it began.

A season that nearly ended in January

What followed was the sort of reversal that keeps people returning to this nest year after year. Jackie laid a replacement egg on Feb. 24 and a second on Feb. 27. By early March, full-time incubation was underway. By March 31, Friends of Big Bear Valley had officially started Pip Watch, the stretch when viewers begin scanning the shells for the first real sign of a chick pushing outward.

The first pip appeared on April 3. A day later, the second egg showed signs of hatching too. The suspense was built into the biology. Once a pip appears, a chick can still need many hours, and sometimes a couple of days, to fully emerge.

That slow pace is part of what makes the Big Bear nest so compelling. The stream runs around the clock as a free public window into one high mountain nest. Over time, it has turned Jackie and Shadow into something more than distant wildlife. For many viewers, they feel like recurring figures in a story people have learned to follow closely.

Jackie, especially, carries a local history with her. She was the first recorded bald eagle chick hatched in Big Bear Valley in 2012. The current Shadow is not the 2015 eaglet that was also named Shadow, but an older resident male who later became Jackie’s mate.

That history helps explain why this hatch feels so consequential. Jackie and Shadow last raised chicks successfully in 2025, when all three eggs hatched. One chick, Misty, died during a winter storm, but Sunny and Gizmo fledged in June, marking the first time the pair had sent two chicks into the air in the same season. Earlier successful seasons produced Simba in 2019 and Spirit in 2022.

Seen against that record, the 2026 hatch feels less like a routine wildlife update and more like a hard-earned return.

The next stage will be quieter, but no less important. Newly hatched eaglets can be fed the same day they emerge, usually in tiny bites of fish or meat, and the parents will spend the early stretch brooding almost constantly. If the chicks stay healthy, they still have months to go. Last year’s surviving eaglets did not leave the nest until they were about 90 days old.

This season also arrives with a human absence around the nest. In February, Sandy Steers, the longtime executive director of Friends of Big Bear Valley, died at 73. She helped build the audience for Big Bear’s eagles and was central to the effort that brought the nest cam into public view.

That makes this week’s hatch feel like more than a wildlife milestone. It also feels like the continuation of something she helped people learn to watch closely.