February 13: Look! Eagles!

So, Ron was doing laundry (he brought the car with him) and Joyce was puttering around the house. While glancing out the window she noticed more than the usual number of people looking up in the trees (usually it's not more three or four people at a time casually glancing to the trees). Finally Joyce couldn't stand it anymore and went out to investigate.

Well, it turns out that two bald eagles, one mature with a white head and one immature still in brown feathers, had been overhead fighting over a fish. During the fight the fish fell out of their grip and landed about 35 feet from my front door! The crowd was watching the two eagles who were now perched in the trees, presumably waiting for people to go away so they could swoop down and get the fish (shown below).

Joyce would have run for her camera with the telephoto zoom lens, but it was in the car. Ron's big Nikon D200 was in the motorhome so she ran and got that and proceeded through a number of very frustrating minutes because she couldn't get the thing to work. Remembering the battery charger was on the counter, Joyce sprinted to the motorhome again and grabbed the battery that was indeed charging. But still no luck making the camera work. While she gave up on the Nikon and ran for the little camera she carries in her purse, the mature eagle finally took off, circled a few times, and went to look for one of the many other fishes in the ocean.

This immature eagle was still waiting for the crowd to clear.

Occasionally the neck would stick out and the head would turn sideways, probably for a better look at the fish on the ground.

Eventually the second eagle gave up, too, and flew off. When Ron got home Joyce (a) confessed to pressing a lot of buttons on his camera in what became a rather random pattern after a while and (2) asked for a lesson in how to make the dang thing work so as to be prepared for the next photographic emergency!