A bald eagle came into my view that winter morning looking quite foolish.
He was chasing three mergansers through the air over the creek, which was a fool’s errand. The mergansers quickly out-paced him, and he did a U-turn to land on a bare branch on a winter morning.
He looked as though he didn’t quite know what to do.
He was a young adult, not fully feathered in grown-up foliage. He wasn’t simply acting the avian fool with the mergansers, for he perched in a tree just over the paved walking path on the causeway over the creek, exposing himself to an odd menagerie of humans. There were mothers with little children, runners and groups of friends, all of whom were too big to eat. And there was me, a photographer with his camera.
I positioned myself beneath him and snapped some photos of him through thick, obscuring branches. This was not a good situation for him or me, so he flew off to another branch down the creek where he could feel safer and I had a less obscured but more distant view.
As proven by his earlier pursuit of the mergansers, he was hungry. There were ducks and geese below him, but he appeared too disheartened to chase them after his failure to capture a meal during his earlier flight. He was still young, with his tail just beginning to turn white and his head with flecks of adolescent brown in it.
A mother with three toddlers was photographing her children on the rocks opposite where he perched. Suddenly, he jumped off his perch, flew across the creek and made a pass twenty feet over the youngsters’ heads. Nothing good to eat here.
He perched again on a tree opposite to where he had been, near the mother and her kids, and this is where my opportunity came in. He was close, unobscured by the branches and unworried.
I snapped away.
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