Not growing up ever seeing an eagle made them the holy grail for me when I came to the PNW. They were just coming back from being endangered but now they are thriving. Each summer we spend about a week on a bay with a nesting pair that enjoy a very charmed life. I don’t know everything about eagles but I know they are not the great hunters people think, they are scavengers and opportunists. When this couple is not eating clams & oysters, they are waiting for the ospreys to catch something and then trying to steal that catch. I knew someone that worked for Fish & Wildlife that told me about seeing inside of an eagle’s nest and it was full of collars & pet tags. Yes, we have much more lost cat & dog signs in my area than most. I also know they are very territorial in nesting & you will not usually find more than one nest within a mile or so of each other. They mate for life & return to the same nest each year. When the salmon are spawning, you can go up to a river about an hour from us and watch the eagles pick up giant salmon and carry them into the trees to eat. It is kind of spooky to see salmon skeletons hanging from all the trees. I have some good juvenile eagle shots but today is about the adults, so enjoy!
I caught this one eating a clam.
Not sure why her protective eye membrane came out in this next shot.
She then decided I was a little too close so maybe she should take dinner to go.
I have no idea how she did this but actually took a bite while flying!
She definitely lets me know when she has had enough of me following her around.
After dinner, she took a quick bath and then up into a tree to hang out and wait for the next opportunity.
Got any eagle stories? Any other bird related things happening in your area? We just started seeing the big flocks of snow geese so hoping to feature them in a few weeks when I can get out and get some shots. Have a great Sunday!
Wow, those phots are incredible!
I’d never seen an eagle until I went to Alaska last summer. Then I saw a bunch, and it was exciting each time. Once, I was watching a bear catch a fish in a little stream and an eagle swooped down over the bear and I was like “this is the most American (in a non-obnoxious way) thing I have ever witnessed.”
Alaska is great for eagle watching. I saw the only golden eagle I have ever seen there.
I’ve seen them on occasion but they never seem that interesting, to be honest. But their cousins the Ospreys are huge fun. They’re way more acrobatic and active and they vocalize a lot more. Like the Baldies, they have benefitted enormously from the major cutbacks in DDT, and it’s easy to see them nesting in a lot of places.
I love ospreys but not sure I have ever heard them vocalize. I know eagle sounds though and ours are very vocal. I do love to watch the osprey fish, where I shot these eagle shots an osprey pair nest. When they hover over this bay and drop into the water it is spectacular. Not sure if you know this but they will drown before letting go of a fish! They will catch such large fish that they fly with it forward facing for aerodynamic reasons, while an eagle just holds it with its talons any old way. These eagles follow the osprey back to their nests to try to steal their fish but it usually doesn’t work out so well as osprey are fierce fighters.
Great pics Loveshaq! I have a very tiny dog that I’m always afraid is going to get picked up by a hawk or owl – so I don’t usually let him out unless I’m out with him. If I had an eagle in my area, I would go out with all of my dogs every time. The fam got Itty Bit a coyote/hawk vest for Xmas a couple of years ago. It’s got all kinds of spikes on it. We call him Mad Max when he has it on. He looks hilarious.
I have never seen one of those vests. I will have to look that up. Yeah, you never want to let little dogs or cats out around here between raptors and coyote and even raccoons will eat cats.
@loveshaq
Here they are – or at least the one Itty Bit has.
https://www.coyotevest.com
I’ve never seen that! Funny but if it works, great idea.
Reminds me of this poster that my brother had in the ’80s.
ha! you thought id pick the eagles didnt you? (no you didnt coz this comment came out of nowhere)
wonderfull pics tho 🙂
Actually, knowing you, I expected this…
woah….ive actually never heard of them
that is nice!
well played sensei!
*bows*
Beautiful photos.
Eagles. I did a video shoot probably about 10 years ago in Moline when I was in marketing. The Mississippi River is right there, dividing what’s called the Quad Cities. The shoot was in the dead of winter, and started at five-thirty am. It was 29 degrees below zero.
After the shoot (a parolee roundup) my salesperson, videographer, and I decided to drive over to Iowa across the river, just to say we’d been to Iowa. As we went across the bridge, there were probably 20 or more eagles swooping down into the river grabbing up fish between chunks of ice.
The video guy got super excited and made us pull over, grabbed his camera, then charged out onto the pedestrian walkway, went to the middle, and started filming eagles. It’s probably 11 am now, so the temperature is about 15 degrees below, and there’s a 10-15 mph wind coming down the river basin. And we’re standing on a bridge. He’s yelling, do you know how much stock footage of eagles COSTS? Uh, no, dude, can’t say I did then or now.
I followed him, stood there for maybe 5 minutes (probably more like 2), and ran back to the car, shaking like a leaf. Florida boy. That idiot filmed those eagles for a solid half-hour. I still don’t know how he didn’t catch pneumonia.
Awesome story! Would love to see that footage. Always amazes me how cold doesn’t bother these birds.
I will say that watching them pull fish out of that river was pretty amazing. I just couldn’t do it for long.
Eagles are majestic but I was actually quite tickled when I discovered they are basically sky raccoons. There was a photo in Nat Geo once of 4 or 5 of them on a garbage dump in Alaska or Canada just going nuts. That and the fact that it was a toss up between eagles and turkeys for America’s birb are things I occasionally think about. If they’d gone with turkeys on the money, would we be eating bald eagles at Thanksgiving? Would they be in cat food??
South of Seattle there is a dump that has tons of eagles. If u live near there you have a good chance of having garbage fall on your head from one of those “sky raccoons”
Found the story
Is the brown eagle in that video a baby bald eagle or a different eagle? A large golden brown eagle perched on a branch near my balcony this morning. My phone was too crap to capture it, but I was wondering if it was a young bald eagle or a golden one.
It is a juvenile bald eagle. Golden eagles are very rare in WA. They are also way bigger than bald eagles.
We have eagles in the area but I think I’ve only seen one–mostly it’s the ospreys that I’ll see in terms of the large birds of prey. I have an aunt and uncle who live in Sauk City, WI, which is right on the Wisconsin River. There are a ton of bald eagles which live there and you can go there pretty much any time of day and see them hanging out.
We’ve had an immature bald eagle cruising through our neighborhood since early fall. We have (or had) a ton of squirrels, finches, sparrows, and juncos, so there’s definitely plenty of food for him/her. I just haven’t been able to get a photo of it, but I have had the binocs out at least once when it came ’round. Beautiful bird.
About 40 miles north of St. Louis is an area along the Mississippi where bald eagles like to roost in winter. My lazy ass has never been there.
However, one time my roomie and I were driving home from college up near Iowa and driving through Hannibal, I looked over on a street sign and was thinking wow that’s a really really really big chicken hawk and I’ve never seen a hawk with a white head and then I yelled out “bald FUCKING eagle!!!!” so my roomie would look, too,
It was so cool to see it hanging out chilling on a sign post.
GORGEOUS pics, Shaq!!
Those are GREAT😃😁🤗💖
I’m with those of y’all, calling them sky-raccoons, though!😉
They are majestic & pretty in pics, but… kiiiiinda duds, when their reputation meets reality.
They’re thief-y, and *personally for me,* too often harbingers of automobile-related DOOM!😉😆🤣
I don’t know WHY it happens, but over the years, since I moved to the MSP metro-region, whenever my car is fixin’ to need MAJOR repairs, or is about to crap out on me, necessitating a new vehicle, I start seeing new Baldies, or Baldies where I don’t regularly see them.
I joke with my roommate, that whenever my car’s gonna break, Bald Eagles start to mock me!😆😂🤣🤣🤣
In the same way that I stsrt to see mass-quantities of red-tailed hawks, when shit’s gonna go sideways for awhile, but ok long term.
I see red-tailed hawks fairly regularly… it’s odd if I don’t see at least one on a commute when I have to drive to work, if it’s daylight, and the weather is even halfway decent…
It wasn’t unusual to see as many as 5-6 one way, back when my commute was almost an hour each way….
But THAT*** day, I counted thirteen–and I might have missed a few, before I started to count!
Now I KNOW the spots where the mated pairs hunt together… I see three pairs, fairly often, on that stretch…
And I KNOW the stretches of road, where I see the solitary hunters, too!
That DOESN’T explain all the rest I saw that day…
Like, it became odd enough, that by about hawk 8 or 9, I was thinking, “Ok, something BIG is gonna happen… dunno what, but OBVIOUSLY with this many hawks, it’ll shake out ok…
As soon as I got home, parked in the garage, and got my phone out of my pocket, and SAW how many calls I had, I knew why I saw them….
I had about a dozen calls, and a handful of texts, telling me to call my aunites–the first words out of my Auntie’s mouth were, “your mom’s ok, but….”
The hawks WERE right that day…
It was a SLOG, but things turned out ok for Mom, and we got through to the other side.
Didn’t see as many, when it was dad who got rushed to that same hospital,but it WAS more than ny usual number, too (8 or 9-ish that day)😉
And when I had my surgery (in the years between mom’s & dad’s), and was waiting to hear whether the lump was cancer or not–it was the first day I’d managed to walk laps around the nurses station all by myself (I think 2 days post-surgery?), and I stopped by the family lounge, to look at the sunset… didn’t see the usual pigeons one sees in that part of Minneapolis, and I wondered why.
Then I saw the raptor… couldn’t quite tell because of the sunset which it was, because the bird was back-lit at first… then it swooped around, and flipped, so I COULD see it’s belly…
Creamy-white, and that red, barred tail.
And that’s how I KNEW I was gonna be ok–i got the confirmation the next morning from my doctors, that after they sliced all through the tumor, and checked EVERY slide, it was all benign–no cancer😉💖
I don’t know WHY buteos bring me luck/good news, but I VERY much appreciate that they seem to–or maybe I just look at the sky more often, when I’m stressed?😉
I DO know they were also incredibly rare when I was a child–although i DID see them more often than many folks i know did back then… But I’m incredibly grateful to have that pretty visual signal!😁💕💞💖
**the FIRST time it happened, was the day my mom ended rushed via ambulance to the regional hospital, with diabetes & gangrene, needing her toe amputated later that night… the second was the big R-vote to repeal “Obamacare” that John McCain gave the Thumbs down vote on, and there have been MANY other, smaller incidents–like dad’s, since😉
That some crazy omens there! I’ve heard of the blue bird of happiness but you take the bird signs to a whole new level!
Raptors have been my favorite birds since I was a kid, when they started the peregrine falcon releases, and especially the ones which got released over in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood, on the old Sears Tower.
I knew that part of The Cities well, because that was where we stayed when I’d have my back appointments at Shriner’s Hospital…
My parents and I went to The Raptor Center a time or two, too, because it was just a bit off Snelling, over by the State Fairgrounds.
In the years since, I’ve been lucky enough to see Coopers Hawks, obviously Red Tails, Baldies, a Turkey Vulture or two, and there’s a newer birb up by Rogers/Maple Grove, which I’m trying to suss out…
It’s BIG, an Eagle of some sort, I think–because it’s the size of a Turkey Vulture,but *unlike* them, doesn’t have a “naked” (featherless) head….
It could be an immature Bald Eagle… but the feather “pattern”/silhouette doesn’t quite look like most of the baldies I’ve seen…
This one is SOLID out to the ends of the wings, then spreads out at the tips, *almost* like “fingers”–where the baldies can have some “fringey” looks on the back edges of their wing…
I’m wondering if perhaps this one is a Golden… I know we’ve GOT populations of them now, here in the Metro… and the area where I see it is close enough to the convergence of the Crow & Mississippi rivers, for it to BE a Goldie😉
I’m guessing that I’ll have a solididea in a year or so, because by then it’ll be three, and if it’s abaldiethehead& tail will go white