KSHB 41 reporter Claire Bradshaw covers eastern Jackson County, including Blue Springs and Grain Valley. Share your story idea with Claire.
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Fifth graders at Prairie Branch Elementary in the Grain Valley School District are getting a front-row seat to nature — and a science lesson — thanks to a bald eagle livestream camera in Blue Springs.
Teacher Tammera Lewis has been showing her class the Blue Springs bald eagle cam daily, using it as a background feature during work time and as a springboard for science lessons.
"We actually ended up doing like a mini study on the bald eagle so that they could learn more about what they were seeing," Lewis said. "And so they were kind of learning like why they have wings, why they have feathers, how it works when they have eggs in the nest."
While the city of Blue Springs named the eagles Liberty and Freedom, Lewis' class has their own set of names: Egg-atha and Shell-don.
The hands-on learning has made an impression on the students.
"I like saw him like catch a fish and eat it, so it's kind of cool," Noah Kelcher said. "I didn't know they lived by water."
"They're vertebrates, and they mostly live in North America," Parker Schieper said.
"They have really big wings, which also keep them really warm, so they don't get as like cold as we would," Reese Dudley said.
The livestream is the result of a multi-group partnership aimed at getting people to learn about eagles and care about conservation efforts. For these students, the excitement has only grown — there are now three eggs in the nest.
"Everybody's just like, oh my gosh, look, there's another egg," Reese said. "Like whenever the second eagle would come, the mom would like move off the eggs, and everybody would be like, oh my gosh, there's multiple eggs. ... Everybody looks up and then just looks at it for like five minutes and then gets back to work."
The eggs are expected to hatch in the next couple of weeks, starting egg watch around mid-March.
"I'm looking forward to watch them hatch in like a month or so," Noah said.
The Prairie Branch Mustangs will eventually become Grain Valley Eagles. But for now, they're learning from the real thing.
"The eagles, they're like almost a part of our class," Parker said.
You can watch the bald eagle livestream here.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
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