Massive eagle nest spotted in West Texas amazes wildlife officials. ‘I mean golly’

Sitting on a rock, resting for a moment under the West Texas sky, something in the distance caught Craig Hensley’s eye.

A massive collection of sticks piled on stone, a nest hidden in the side of a cliff wall towering over the sand and scrub of the Chihuahuan Desert — it was a bald eagle nest, he told McClatchy News, but not like any he’d ever seen.

“That nest, I mean golly … that’s the biggest nest by far that I’ve ever seen in my life,” Hensley told McClatchy News in a phone interview.

Unless they decide to abandon it, bald eagles will often return to a nest year after year, adding more material to it each time, making it bigger.

“I would love to know how many years that thing has been there,” he said.

A biologist with the state Parks and Wildlife Department’s Texas Nature Trackers program, Hensley was on a staff retreat at the Devils River State Natural Area when he and fellow team members spotted the occupied nest, he said.

Texas Nature Trackers shared a photo of the nest in a Dec. 13 Facebook post.

“I’m guessing a few people could sit in the thing, I’ll tell you that,” Hensley.

But he wasn’t content to simply guess at its size. After doing some math, using the average size of a bald eagle as a point of reference, he estimates the nest “is about 15 feet across.”

If accurate, that would make the bald eagle nest one of the largest ever recorded in the U.S.

Currently, the record belongs to a 2-ton nest previously discovered in Florida, according to the National Audubon Society, which measured 8 feet across, or 7 feet less than the Devils River nest. However, the Florida nest was also 18 feet tall.

A harsh home

It isn’t just the size of the Devils River nest that surprises experts.

Hensley says the bald eagle pair nesting by Devils River are accidental pioneers.

“That’s the only pair of bald eagles nesting that have been documented … that far west in Texas, maybe ever,” he said.

The vast majority of Texas’s eagle nests are in the eastern half of the state, where water and prey are plentiful, he said. Still, the eagles have managed to eke out an existence in the desert, likely thanks in part to the nesting near the Devils River.

“This is certainly a remarkable bald eagle nest for a couple of reasons,” Jared Zimmerman, eagle biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told McClatchy News in an email.

“This really is a huge nest and probably quite old,” he said, adding that the unusual location of the nest could explain why.

Eagles typically build a nest in the trees, he said, but by settling down in the face of a cliff, the nest is protected from destructive elements like wind and rain which might otherwise send it tumbling to the ground.

“Bald eagles nesting on cliffs/ledges like this is not super common and speaks to how adaptable they are and how much their population is continuing to increase,” Zimmerman said.

In 1971, there were only five bald eagle nest sites in Texas, according to state wildlife officials. Conservation efforts have helped the birds regain ground, and a 2005 survey found that the number of active nests had grown to 160, officials said.

The Devils River State Natural Area is about 250 miles west of Austin.

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