This report about American Bald Eagles with 9 pages and 21 photographs from places as varied
as Connecticut, Illinois, MA and MO was put together as casual by-product of a few years
of Birding. Eagles have become fairly common and have been taken off the Endangered Species
list. After observing an eagle pair nest at a distance of little more than 50 yards from a popular
ice cream stop in a tourist town in Florida, I also have taken them off my priority list. Now, why
would a pair of America's Birds establish a nest adjacent to a busy parking lot..? Simple. First
came the developers and bulldozers. After most of the dense forests had been razed to make way
for housing, malls and cars, after all that, hurricanes took down what had become easy targets.
Therefore, with choices gone, eagles now nest in the few tall trees left standing.
Sure, there are a few images I’d like to get. But I’m not striving after them. If they come about,
they come about. And I certainly would like to be able to capture the type of action shown on
page 2 again, but with my current equipment which would allow for much cleaner results.
In the future I intend to scan some of the pictures here with some enhancing software applied.
In most cases a Bald Eagle on a perch will just take off at the approach of a photographer,
careful as one might be. And so it happened with the above photo one winter day in early 2000 somewhere close to the Illinois River not too far from Ellis Bay, MO, where I got to do the
American Kestrel story a few months later.
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