When I was working on my bald eagle book 10 years ago, the bird often drew attention. Many times when I was photographing one, people would stop and talk about how cool it was to see it.
Fast forward to this past week. I was in a field with several other photographers when a pair of bald eagles circled over us. Nobody else looked up. Short-eared owls were deemed more interesting.
This isn’t a case of something being wrong. Rather, it’s a case of something being right.
For a few weeks a year, hundreds of bald eagles congregate along a short stretch of Hood Canal near the town of Seabeck, Washington. Bald eagles are opportunistic. While they are skilled hunters, they don't work any harder than they have to for their meals. Between a fish migration and wide tidal swings, the feeding is easy there in May and June.
There is no question that bald eagles are skilled hunters. They can spot a fish from a mile away and fly to it in under a minute.
But they’re also masters of something scientists call kleptoparasitism: the art of stealing food from others. In my book The Year of the Eagle, I documented bald eagles stealing food from crows, great blue herons and even other eagles.
A couple of days ago, however, I captured an especially dramatic act of thievery. I saw a bald eagle steal a rabbit from a young red fox. Even more impressive: at times, this battle played out more than 20 feet in the air.
If you would have asked me a decade ago about how a bird knows how to fly, I would have regurgitated the answer I was taught in school: They are hatched knowing how. But after intensely studying a bald eagle nest for three years, I not only believe the young eaglets learn to fly, but that their parents also learn to be better parents.
The lucky part was driving behind this bald tree and finding two bald eagles using it as a platform to hunt for food. The not so lucky part involved wading in a freshly-fertilized field to line up the tree with the rising moon.
On a first date, no less.
