I distinctly recall the first american bald eagle I ever saw in the wild, it was Oct/'86 and I was motoring along on Route 17 in the Catskill mountain range on my Harley Tour Glide, having delivered an important envelope to IBM in Binghamton NY for a courier service I drove for I was heading back east to White Plains. Just outside of Damascus pacing my speed and direction an eagle appeared about 40 feet off to the right of me flying over a sheer drop off ridge that the highway followed, I slowed down a bit & we were side by side for the longest 10 seconds of my life. I was in my 30's, a hunter and had spent many years covering that same ground while deer and pheasant hunting, I'd never seen a bald eagle, their population was decimated in the 40s through the 70s with the widespread use of DDT which was finally banned in '72 by the US.
Now I live in northern Minnesota (way north) where within a 50 mile radius of me there are no less than 400 mating pair of bald eagle. I fish a very small lake out of town that has a nest in a towering white pine directly above my favorite panfish hole, without fail I find eagle feathers floating or on the shoreline every time I'm out there, of course it's against the law to possess or even handle the feathers so I leave them be. If I'm doing any decent amount of driving in any given week I'll usually see about 2 to 5 (at different times) eagles out gliding over the hay fields looking for any easy meal, I've seen them dive into and fly away from the lake with fish clutched tightly. I've been on the lake ice and watched from 25 feet away as a pair of them devoured a deer carcass. If I were to purposefully go out eagle watching I'd see a dozen any given day. When seen up close the feather detailing and colors really jump out at you in a way that two dimensional images can never compare.
For all the bald eagles I see I have zero pictures to prove it. I live here in MN and so I tend to never take my camera for drives and I'd never take it fishing with me either as replacement value is too high. Eagle spotting has become commonplace for me by now, treated with the familiarity of an everyday occurrence, it still holds my curiosity enough for me to watch if I'm able (i.e. not driving) to see if it will make a kill but I've long ago stop talking about simple sightings to anyone.
The second moment that I'll remember forever was back in April of '95 and my first spring in my log home. My friend Todd and I were talking outside when two shadows appeared on the ground below us, we looked up directly into the sun to see what we thought were two low flying crows, when our eyes adjusted to the glare we were looking at two eagle flying away from us but steadily rising higher and higher, very high....... suddenly one started plummeting toward the ground and the other gave chase when bam! in a split second they'd locked claws and started to tumble, the tumble increasing with speed as they dropped, at a certain safe distance from the ground they broke away from each other and repeated it two more times before moving on. We were in awe, my pal Todd is a master wood caver who's into detailed feather finish work with superb painting abilities. He talks about that to me still today at times.
OK, being as I have no pics and the net is filled with thousands of them so I figured on just picking one I like best.
Roy Toft titled this one Alaska eagle:
Any eagle or bird watchers out there that would like to share?
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