Bald Eagle Country – A sunny day!

Woke this morning to this strange bright light in the sky….it had been so long I almost forgot what it looked like!

as we approached the boat launch, realized, first from my hands that were rapidly getting cold, that there had even been a touch of frost.

Still a bit of snow over there on the top of the mountain….

water levels are still high, but there were a few Bald Eagles feeding along the water’s edge…

Morning reflections……while I was taking the above

shots, this young juvenile flew over, managed to swing around and get a picture of him in flight.

Looking across the estuary towards Mt. Woodside, with the mist rising off the water.

After lunch we went back down in hopes of being able to get some good shots…..

Could hear Swans out there, as well as Canada Geese, while we were watching, this quartet of Trumpeter’s flew past….

I’ve had Trumpeter’s fly in and land right in front of me before, but that didn’t happen this time, they did a big circle and then flew off down the Harrison River.

Just out of curiosity I thought I’d try cropping in even more to give you the detail on those 2 middle Swans – the bit of orange on the bills identifies them as definitely Trumpeters, rather than Tundra.

Well it worked for the swans so tried it with this male Bufflehead duck…since I hadn’t been able to get a closer picture of him.  The Buffleheads have just returned to the area, hopefully I’ll be able to get some better pictures of these cute little guys as they usually spend the winter with us.

I wanted to show this view before I leave you this time, this is looking back towards the area where we live, that body of water is our boat launch, and there are two things of interest, one is the fact that there are still a lot of fish (Chum Salmon) in the water and this is a good thing….

They’re hard to see, but all those dark shapes are Salmon…Salmon returns have been extremely low and since the Eagles eat the spawned out Salmon, there have been fears for their welfare.  A late run was hoped for and it looks like we may have it as I haven’t seen this many fish for a while.

The other thing of note, and it is really hard to see, but these trees that sit between where we live and the estuary have become a favourite roosting spot, probably because there is no human activity right there even though it is really close to the main road.  When I blew this up full size on my computer and roamed around on the picture, I found 14 Bald Eagles and there are probably more.