Category Archives: Bald Eagle

Strong Light

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This is our last walk together for a couple of weeks. Aki knows that I am leaving. She watched me pack a bag last night. We take the usual route through Downtown, squinting against a strong morning light. It clarifies with sharp contrasts of darks and lights and throws cloud shadows on to the flank of Mt. Juneau. On a telephone pole someone has attached a “Have You Seen This Cat?” sign. Beyond it I can see the nest of our neighborhood eagles. They usually carry off a few felines during famine time.

 

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The little dog dawdles, stopping too often to sniff and mark spots with her scent. She doesn’t need clarifying light to learn who passed through here during the night. Where the hillside drops steeply away from Gastineau Avenue, three ravens sun themselves high in cottonwood trees. Two break off twigs, perhaps for a nest. The third stares down channel where dark clouds climb over the Douglas Island Ridge.

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Down on South Franklin Street, a young woman pulls her luggage between shuttered tee shirt shops and jewelry stores and stops in front of a tropical clothing store. She opens a suitcase and fluffs out its contents, including a pink dress with fancy black trim suitable for 1890’s dance hall work. The police will soon find her in this light, make her pack up and move on like they do the other homeless.

Invading the Privacy of Crows

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We were talking politics when I slipped on shale and cut my hand (discussing politics with a human friend, not Aki). That was the second mistake. The first was attempting to round False Outer Point after the incoming tide had already covered the easy beach path.

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The point provides us with a windbreak and no rain falls from the sky. But otherwise, the walk offers little but low-level risk and enough crows to satisfy Alfred Hitchcock.

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I don’t realize I’m bleeding until three crimson drops hit Aki’s yellow wrap. I elevate my injured hand and squeeze it closed to slow the flow. Overhead two bald eagles fly out over the channel and return to their spruce roosts. Crows darken the beach just ahead of us. When we cross their privacy line, they explode into the air. Are we invading the privacy they have come to expect each time the tide rises high enough to block human access to their beach? Maybe because my little dog looks so much like a stuffed animal I wonder if we have stumbled on the equivalent of a teddy bears’ picnic.

Timing or Luck?

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Aki and I just rounded the spit that forms the western jaw of Fish Creek’s mouth. In five minutes the path will be closed by the incoming tide. A strong wind blows down the creek, appearing to come from a break in the clouds hanging over the Douglas Island ridge. For the brief moments that the break will last, sunlight reaches the glacier and the lower flanks of the mountains that surround it.

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A slim, white eagle feather spirals down, distracting me long enough for me to miss the flight of a mature bald eagle over our heads and into a screen of spruce trees. Ducks, spooked by the eagle fly off before I can photograph them against the face of the glacier. Bad timing, little dog. She gives me what looks like a “think it through dummy” stare. She probably just wants to escape the wind but my brief anthropomorphic moment makes me wonder whether opportunities to witness the wonderful or beautiful in nature is controlled more by luck than timing.

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It was in part good timing that placed us here during the brief storm break illuminating the glacier. Such things tend to happen just as the sun first reaches mountain peaks. Knowledge of tide tables allowed us to sneak past the headland just before being cut off by the flooding tide. But the rest was a matter of uncontrollable luck.

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Winter Quiet

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Aki and I leave Chicken Ridge early, before the scheduled start of the Women’s March. In a half-an-hour our escape route down Main Street will be blocked. The sun crowns above Pt. Salisbury, infusing wispy clouds above the channel with Easter-egg colors. It’s cold and windy but the little dog and I are dressed for it and the colder temperature we will have along the Eagle River.

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The big meadow that feeds migratory birds Spring and Fall wears a new covering of snow, untracked except for those left by a cross country skier and a clutch of snowshoe hares. One bald eagle skulks near the meadows edge where it searches the riverbanks for food. Small lines of surf roll up river and the incoming tide lifts and cracks new ice. We have to take a long detour around the normally dry meadow channel because chucks of heavy ice now slosh against each other on tidal water.

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This early (It’s sunrise) I expect solitude but we meet a group of young woman chattering and sliding over the new snow on skis. They fill the air with something like tropical bird song, a impression reinforced by the flash and color of their hi-tech clothes. Soon winter-quiet returns. The sun breaks over a forested hill to sparkle the new snow and the great blocks of river ice stranded on the meadow by the tide. In the forest I find a single high bush cranberry set to glowing by a streak of sunlight that managed to penetrate the old growth. Made sweet by the winter freeze, it tastes as good as it looks.

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It’s Back

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Thinking that the recent run of warm weather will continue this morning, I dressed for spring, not winter. Now I wish I’d checked with Shamus, our electronic weather icon, before driving out to Fish Creek. Shamus was probably wearing his heavy coat, muffler, and watch cap. I could use his heavy coat. Aki could probably use her winter wrap but she doesn’t complain. So, I don’t.

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Much has happened on the Fish Creek delta since our last visit. The six-inch-thick pond ice covering shattered and islands of it rode a big tide high up onto the meadow. Already new ice replaces it. There’s new snow two, maybe four inches or so, covering the trail. Aki bounds over it like a deer, ears flopping, eyes looking for a drift deep enough for a face plant. We hear an eagle but see nothing on the land but ermine and dog walker tracks.

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We have sun, at least the islands and mountains on the other side of Fritz Cove and the channel have it. They stand whiten by new, sunlit snow. But the little dog and I walk in a dusk that will last until night. Hundreds of ducks, mallards mostly, and scoters work the stream mouth. The scoters flew off minutes ago but the ducks stay as if they know it is too cold for the dog or I to swim into their territory.

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Jumpy Birds

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The flooding tide just displaced this murder of crows from an offshore bar. They regrouped on a lumpish rock thirty feet from where Aki and I emerge from the woods. My dog ignores the crows, as she tends to do with corvids except for our neighborhood ravens, which act like her teasing cousins. One by one the crows launch into the air. A small one keeps a look out while the rest line up like jets waiting to take off at the Seattle airport. I wonder if this organized nonchalance is designed to hide fear.

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The ducks and scoters are definitely jumpy. There were two rafts of mallards when we arrived but one group panicked into a short flight to join up with the other. Now they hang close to shore while one of their number cackles in way that would suggest insanity in a human. The party colored harlequin ducks are quick to dive until driven to flight by the appearance of a bald eagle overhead. This sets some mergansers off and into the air.

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The eagle pulls back its talons and skulks back to its spruce roost. I want to hang around and watch micro bursts of wind push small waves through the ducks’ formations but Aki whines. She has a point. It’s blowing hard, a wind that propels raindrops like missiles. I followed her into the woods where the storm hums through the canopy and we have to climb over a hemlock tree downed by the last windstorm.

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Avian Rodeo

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Trying to focus a camera is probably the worse thing to do when a dozen bald eagles are flying over your head. Bur here I am, pointing it skyward. There are ravens too, more athletic than the eagles, more aggressive. Holding Aki’s leash and a full poop bag in one hand, I move the camera in the general direction of the birds and click like mad. If I drop the camera now, I could watch their dives and in the case of the ravens, barrel rolls. I might figure out why they spend so much energy during this time of near-famine. Could it be sport—an avian rodeo?

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The little dog and I push on into the wind and climb from seawater to Chicken Ridge. A block from home we stumble on a small flock of European Starlings harvesting in our neighbor’s yard. Sunlight angling up Main Street enriches their chestnut feathers and brightens the males’ reds and violets. Here, the camera proves a better tool for accessing beauty and personality.

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Low Tide at Fish Creek

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We have one more day of gray before the sun returns. According to the weatherman, it will bring glacier-borne winds to chill Chicken Ridge and the rest of Downtown Juneau. The promised wind will make short work of the frost feathers now decorating town. Thier angular crystals cling to almost every surface from car roof to spruce tips. They brighten the bare-branched alders that line Fish Creek. Aki and I visit there to enjoy the show.

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Aki finds a brace of miniature collie dogs to chase near the Fish Creek Pond but otherwise we have the place to ourselves. Leaving the pond, we walk down an icy trail that splits a frosty forest of beach roses and cow parsnip stalks to a spot offering an unobstructed view of Fritz Cove and the Chilkat Mountains beyond.

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All the bird action is near the tide line where mallards grumble, a heron wades, and a bald eagle rests on a rock. The sky hints at the change of weather. Rather than forming a locked pearl and gray ceiling above the mountains, the clouds scatter and pastel pinks and purples paint their bottoms.

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On our return to the car I hear what sounds like a murder of happy crows. When we get closer I can tell that it is a chorus made by children playing a pickup game of hockey on a small pond. Even if they look up from their ice, they wouldn’t be able to see the pastel clouds, the heron or the eagle. They wouldn’t even see the mountains. But their apparent joy exceeds mine.

Fog

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Aki dashes around Sandy Beach, one of our most popular dog walk. She ignores the old mine air shaft, a tall, rectangular battlement with a pitched roof now appearing and disappearing in the fog. As I try to focus my camera, the fog appears to grow thousands of feet in height until it obscures all but the top of Mount Juneau. It deflates as quickly, as if it is being eaten like cotton candy by the sun. In a minute it is barely taller than the airshaft.

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All the miners who were served by the airshaft managed to escape before water from Gastineau Channel flooded the tunnels of the Mexican Mine. Before that day, even the sharp-eared Aki would not be able to hear my summons over the sound of ore crushers that ran 24 hours a day except for Christmas and the Fourth of July.

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I imagine the miners moiling in lantern-lit depths while fog shrank and expanded over the channel on sunny January days. They would never know the bright beauty that Aki and I share unless they took their lunch above ground. They entered their tunnels in the dark of morning and left long after the sun disappeared behind the Douglas Island ridge. Maybe, during their dinner after a day like this, their children told them about the fog and how an eagle emerged from it with talons lowered to snatch food from the channel waters.

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Good Movie

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There is nothing I can do about the clouds over Gastineau Channel, no way I can improve the sunrise. But the little dog and I, wanting to enjoy another day in paradise, head out to False Outer Point. We will have to race the tide around the point and cross by the tiny headlands before the beach floods.

As it has since we woke up this morning, the sun illuminates the mountain peaks but leaves all else dominated by clouds except for the Chilkat Range on the far side of Lynn Canal. They shine from ridge top to seawater.

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A sea lion near the point surfaces for a few quick breaths and then makes a shallow dive. He spy hops when Aki barks, then disappears, leaving us alone except for the raft of harlequin ducks just offshore. In minutes they take flight. I spot a kingfisher hunkered down on a large beach rock that leaves when I try to photograph him. Maybe he moved to avoid a bald eagle that flies over our head and the kingfisher’s perch, extends both talons and rocks toward the sea like a parachutist.

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The sun has gained full purchase over the glacier and its surrounding mountains but we remain in shade. This time of year, we can’t expect daylight on the east side of Douglas Island. I enjoy the pull of this bright land that we cannot touch. It’s like watching a movie in the dark.

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