The nest
In March 2026 we placed a camera above a Chaco Eagle nest and left it streaming around the clock. In twelve days, thousands of people watched Yupanqui learn to fly.
Fewer than a thousand adult Chaco Eagles remain across their entire range. Almost nobody has seen one. A camera above the nest let thousands of people, from anywhere, watch a chick of one of the region’s most threatened birds grow up — without approaching the nest or disturbing the adults.
What you will find here
This page brings together the record of that season: twelve days, from 2 to 14 March 2026, between switching the camera on and Yupanqui’s first flight.
The videos on this page and the channel archive remain permanently available.
The pilot
It was a self-funded trial, with no outreach budget and no paid advertising. These are the results of the first fifteen days.
People came back every day
More than half the views came from people who had watched before, and those returning visits accounted for three quarters of total watch time. The average session lasted over fifteen minutes.
It was not a spike of curiosity. It was an audience that adopted the chick.
The season
We switched the camera on 2 March 2026. Yupanqui was already a large chick, weeks from leaving the nest, and we caught exactly the final stretch: the last visits by the adults with food, the first wingbeats, the rehearsal of the leap.
To set up the camera and solve the connection out in open country we sought technical advice, and that is how we met Luciano, of SERVI-TEC. He became so taken with the project that we offered him, as a welcome, the chance to name the chick. He chose Yupanqui, after Atahualpa.
He flew on 14 March, twelve days later. We left the camera connected: the adults return to the site, and whatever happens next season will be seen again.
An eagle arrives at the nest with a snake
A Chaco Eagle chick spends months in the nest before fledging, fed by both adults. Every visit is a chance to record what they bring, how often they return and how they share the work — data that would otherwise require someone stationed below the nest for weeks.
Why we do it
A species nobody knows is a species nobody defends. The Chaco Eagle dies from direct persecution, poisoned baits and power lines, and many of those deaths happen because whoever causes them does not know what they are looking at.
The camera works alongside the science. The nest being streamed is a monitored nest, and every visit by the adults, every prey item they bring and every step in the chick’s development is recorded. Here, outreach and research are the same task.