The latest reports I've seen say that both eggs collapsed, probably because they were rotten inside. General consensus is that there never were viable chicks inside - the eggs were probably infertile, or else the eggs died soon after conception. What looked like a hole may have been the shell starting to rot.

The parents removed some of the shells from the nest and may have buried other pieces - probably to keep other predators from coming to check out the smell. Watching the process with the second egg made it more obvious that the same thing had happened with the first egg, and a review of the first few minutes after the camera came back on after the first egg disappeared showed what were likely pieces of shell in the nest. (This is based on reading a very long thread - egg turning frequency - where many of the people who seem to know about things post - I'm not an expert!)

Those who have seen the tape from last year noted that the parents started stockpiling food before the eggs hatched - the fact that they didn't do that this year makes me think they never heard any pre-hatch pecking from inside the egg - supporting the theory that the eggs were never viable. As others on the forum there have said, it makes me feel a little better to think that we didn't lose two eaglets because there were never eaglets in the eggs to begin with.

The crew behind the web site have found another nest with hatchlings and are in the process of setting up a camera, though the view won't be as clear - they need to have the camera far enough away to not disturb the nest. It won't be the same as the eagles I watched now and then for the better part of a month (and kind of bonded with, in a strange sort of way) - but I'll probably check out their new site when it comes up.

And they're also talking about a grizzly bear cam - I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be the one to put a camera in a grizzly bear nest, hibernation or not!