Category Archives: Bald Eagle

Back in Rain Forest

1 Reply

1

Back in the rain forest, back with Aki, and it is raining. The little dog and I slip and slide over the wet trail snow, working our way through the coastal woods. While her humans were in the Yukon Territory, Aki enjoyed five sleepovers at a good friend’s house. We fall back into the familiar pattern. She scoots ahead, drawn by an intriguing smell while I search the woods for beauty. Today, she has more luck than me.

3

In this awkward time, when winter drags its feet, I wish for spring—the white, lantern-shaped blueberry flowers, balsam popular incense, and even the appearance of the common skunk cabbage flowers.

2

The pounding of a sapsucker rings like hammer blows when we reach the beach. Aki refuses to venture below the high tide line. It’s the eagles. Two chatter in the top of a beachside spruce. When did that happen? Did the little watch from her perch on the couch one of the neighborhood eagles carry away a cat? “Missing Cat” signs have recently been attached to power poles on our street. Or does the little dog just sense the danger?

Cusp Season

Leave a reply

1

Snow still blocks the road to the Fish Creek trailhead. Aki cruises on top of its crust while I break through. But there is a path of sorts busted through by past visitors. Unfortunately, they all had longer gaits than me so I have to stretch out to match their boot prints. Ahead, in the trees lining Fish Creek pond a murder of crows besiege a lone eagle. I can hear their racket over the sound of my boots crunching through frozen snow.

3

We must be the first human-dog teams to visit this morning because the crows let us get close before stirring. I expect to find the carcass they fight over but no deer bones litter the wetland grass. Rafts of mallards have tucked themselves against the far stream bank, as if they needed shelter on this windless day.

2

Two smells of spring hit me when I reach a section of beach washed of snow by the tides: mud and rotting seaweed. Feet away, the land is locked in the sterile hold of winter. But here the necessary work of decomposition already paves the way for summer growth and autumn harvest.

4

It Doesn’t Make Sense

1 Reply

1

Bald eagles are solo hunters. They don’t cooperate. They don’t like competition. Today, three eagles trying for herring off of Point Louisa spend as much time warning each other off as in diving for fish. I am not one to argue with Darwin, but I can’t figure out the genetic advantage of being so crabby.

3

Harbor seals catch more salmon by working in a pack then they would on their own. Just when pink salmon enter Kowee Creek, two seals splash and crash dive, causing the fish to school up and swim straight toward two other seals. These sweet-eyed predators switch roles with the drivers after they have fed.

2

Aki and I are walking on the snow-slick path with one of my oldest friends. Over the sound of a rising wind we talk about the clearance, during World War II, of Aleut villages. The Native Alaskan residents were relocated to backwaters of Southeast Alaska where they were left to shiver and starve. Somehow 90% of them survived the camps. Many of the survivors never returned to their homeland. Doctor Darwin, what is genetic advantage of treating people like that?

RIP

Leave a reply

2

To get to this pocket grove of old growth spruce, Aki and I had to cross recovering ground. More than 200 years ago, it began rebounding after being crushed by the Lemon Glacier. The Lemon retreated into hanging glacier status but since then someone clearcut most of the old growth that grew in its newly freed earth. Alders and berry brush choked the slashed land until new hemlock and spruce trees managed to rise above the tangled mess and form a second growth forest. The canopy of these thickly packed trees now blocks the light needed for understory plants.

1

Perhaps because they rooted in a hard-to-reach stream valley, the collection of spruce that now surround my little dog and I have stood since America purchased this land from Russia. In a tiny glade formed by the big trees, a bald eagle died and its body was devoured by forest recyclers. Aki tentatively sniffs the corpse—-now just bones and feathers, talons and beak, then backs away. The bird lays on its back with wings splayed out, head upside down. I hope it chose this peaceful place to die after a long life.

3

Snow and Sand

3 Replies

1

We’re visiting the Treadwell ruins, which today, at low tide, offers Aki a chance to run full out on wet sand and porpoise over paths covered with deep snow. After doing her business and checking the pee mail, the little dog links together a series of leaps that propel her far down the trail. When the rubber band connecting us that she imagines stretches to breaking point, Aki returns, otter-like, to my side.

2

While we crossed the Douglas Island Bridge to get here, sunlight broke through the storm clouds to illuminate Gastineau Channel with silver light. But all that is gone by the time we reach the first place that offers a beach view. A new storm pulse has backfilled holes in the marine layer and flattened the light. I mourn the lost opportunity, while my little dog motors flat out across a beach made of pounded gold ore. As if commenting on her happiness, irrational in the midst of the storm, two eagles and a raven scream and croak.

3

Lights and Darks

2 Replies

2

Aki and I are back in the woods where only a dusting of snow covers the trail. It lies, like powdered sugar on the wintering plants. I am struck with the power of white to bring light, clarity, and interest to the rain forest. Is this how, back even before the big Sitka spruce trees we pass first sprouted in the trunk of deadfalls, an innovative artist discovered the illuminating power of white chalk? Did some charcoal portraitist return from a snowy walk inspired to highlight his subject’s eyes with small squares of light?

3

More snow has reached the beach, now exposed by the ebb tide. Here the dark tones of rock and stone demark forms of snowy white. An eagle flies over an almost empty bay, talons extended back, perhaps to balance out the weight of a fish that wriggles in its beak. I can’t make out its white head or tail in the gray light.

1

Place of Pride

1 Reply

1

All the birds we see during this walk on the wetlands are jumpy except this eagle. I hear, rather than see a gathering of Canada geese after something flushed them into the air. Every golden eye or mallard duck flies across the Mendenhall River when I point the camera in its direction. But the eagle remains roosted on the top of a driftwood stump, even when a brace of bird dogs runs toward it. Even after the Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle slices across the face of the glacier behind it.

2

Earlier I lead Aki away from the dog walker trail toward a little-visited slough. Snow from last night’s storm covered the ground. Bent over strands of beach glass formed golden swells on the sea of while. Behind us, the glacier towered above the Pepsi bottling plants. It back-dropped the body shops, boat yards, and the other blue color businesses along Industrial Boulevard. Only in Alaska would a welder’s shop have such a place of pride.

4

 

Signs of Spring?

1 Reply

 

1

One of our neighbors saw a hummingbird yesterday hovering over her garden patch. It’s rufus-red breast feathers must have sparkled in the winter sun. Before this news, I had expected another month and a half of waiting for the migrates to show up on the wetlands—longer until we hear the first robin sing. Wild animals, especially those that will starve if they mistime their migrations, must have some fine insight into seasons and weather patterns. Aki and I are walking toward the mouth of Fish Creek, looking for confirmation of the hummingbird’s prediction that winter is dead.

2

We get little help from the wild rose and berry bushes covered with frost and still bare of spring growth. Ice covers the pond and much of the slower-moving portions of the creek. At the creek mouth, where transient ducks and geese often rest on their way north, we only find the usual crowd. There’s a cabal of crows hanging out with bored looking gulls. Just offshore, resident mallards grumble about our presence. In the middle of Fritz Cove, two mature bald eagles roost on the Number 21 channel marker.

1

Another eagle pair watches us emerge from the trail. One seems to be lecturing the other one, who slowly moves away from its noisy companion, like a guy getting yelled out for doing nothing when the nest needs mending. Eagles mate for life. Maybe the one yelling also saw the hummingbird.

2

 

Soggy Eagle

Leave a reply

1

Normally the trailbreaker, today Aki trots close behind me when as we walk toward the mouth of the Mendenhall River. Maybe she remembers the sound of shotgun blasts thqat carried over the river water when we passed this way during hunting season. The more likely cause of her concern is a mature bald eagle that cocks its white head when we pass so it can examine my little dog with one of its lemon-yellow eyes.

2

In two hours it will be low tide. Already the channel has narrowed and much of the beach is exposed. Herring gulls feed like barnyard chickens in the exposed rockweed. A few mallard ducks burst into the air when we near then join a raft of their kind down at the river’s mouth.

4

Minutes later, the raft of mallards panics into the air and drops back onto river fifty feet away. The two eagles that drove then into the air fight over carrion. One lands and immediately starts ripping away at a carcass. The other one makes a series of imitating dives, coming closer and closer to the feeding eagle until it miscalculates and lands in the water. By hinging its wings before beating them, the soggy bird manages to lift off and return to its spruce tree roost. The other eagle never stopped eating.

5

Backfilling Silence

Leave a reply

1

It’s snowing outside, fat wet flakes twirling in the wind, soaking the surfaces where they land. The flakes land everywhere. I am listening to The Cuban All Star Band and thinking about a kind woman that I had recently met in Havana. Another person present in the room had just asked the question all traveling Alaskans expect: Do you get a lot of snow up there? She had smiled at the mention of snow. “I saw snow just once, on a trip to Madrid,” she said and then smiled like the memory was one of her favorites. She had made snow angels.

2

When the snow is dry and gathered in deep drifts, Aki makes her own version of a snow angel. But this morning, during our walk on outer point beach, what snow that survived last night’s flood tide couldn’t even hide the whorls of driftwood that lie among the severed rockweed above the high tide line.

3

Aki can’t appreciate the swirling white beauty of snow carried on the wind. She doesn’t acknowledge the silence delivered by the storm. Thanks to the low cloud layer and lower visibility no airplane or boat can break the silence. Only the two resident eagles complain, and then only for a few seconds. My traitorous mind backfills the vacuum with memory of a song sung by a Cuban peanut vendor’s that had silenced a crowd of Canadian tourists on Brazil Street. A Spanish speaker would have recognized an artfully delivered sales pitch for the peanuts that filled the paper cones she clutched in one hand. In my ignorance, I heard a lover’s song of longing.

4