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This past
January, my wife, Lynn, and I saw a bald eagle at a small pond
on a military reserve. The day before, we saw a golden eagle
and probably a condor. These sightings inspired us to undertake
the second phase of our old-before-our-time biathlon: bird
watching. The first phase was gardening, but we’ve filled up
nearly every growable inch of our yard, so we’ve hit a lull
until we buy a special rat-proof composter, at which point we’ll
probably tear out our grass and plant a “structural edibles”
garden, comprised chiefly of mature onions and rhubarb. Yes,
this is a sure sign of early onset middle age.
Anyway, the
eagles prompted us to purchase two binoculars—one is rather
fancy—and three bird books (as an aside, we own about 40
gardening books). We spent several weekends driving obscure
Northern Californian roads looking at hawks. At one point, when
we only had two bird books, we saw two Harris’s hawks hunting in
marshland. They looked exactly like the Harris’s hawks in the
better of our two books; they demonstrated the rare multi-raptor
hunting technique described in the book. When we read up more
on them at www.buteo.com, we found that these hawks are very
rare, but if you are lucky—and driving through New Mexico or
Western Texas—you may see them nesting on the ground. The only
way to see Harris’s hawks in Northern California marshland is if
you put them there yourself. We needed a new book.
Our new
book, in addition to informing us that we’d seen northern
harriers rather than Harris’s hawks, showed a neat picture of an
osprey. I wanted to see an osprey. In fact, I added this to my
meager list of goals for the next year: 1) Write more. 2) Eat
fewer french fries. 3) On occasion, eat non-endangered,
non-toxic fish. 4) See more eagles. 5) Keep office less
cluttered. 6) Use boyish good looks and cheerful disposition to
remove Bush from office. 7) See osprey, preferably while diving
to catch a fish. Then, because I’d forgotten to add it before:
8) Buy above-mentioned composter.
Currently,
we’re over halfway through a month-long road trip through the
Northwest (and Canadian Southwest). I don’t recall a day that’s
passed without an osprey sighting. With views of diving
ospreys, baby ospreys, relaxing-by-the-lake ospreys and ospreys
engaging in aerial battles, I can happily check off goal #7. I
wish goal #6 could be that easy.
We’ve now
seen so many bald eagles that if we weren’t tried and true
Americans, we’d be dangerously close to blasé about them.
Judging by the national parks and forests we’ve seen in
Washington, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, Americans are mad about
bald eagles. They pull off the road. They point. They
photograph the eagle, even if it is a small black and white
speck that won’t show up on a disposable camera.
Canadians
are different. I don’t need an encyclopedia to know that their
national bird is not an eagle. Near the beginning of our trip,
when we’d only seen two eagles in total, Lynn and I stopped one
day at a pullout near the Vancouver-Victoria ferry because we
saw dozens of magnificent blue herons flying into a grove of
trees. After a while, we noticed an eagle. By our third day of
observing the grove, we’d seen an entire four-eagle family
terrorize the heron colony. A Canadian couple drove by and
asked what we were looking at. I said, “Eagles.” The man
looked at me like, “That’s it?” Lynn saved us with, “There’s a
breeding pair and two juveniles!” The man thought for a second
and replied, “Right on,” and drove off with just a brief glance
up. The next day, we found out that there’s a place near
Whistler where upwards of 1,000 eagles congregate to snap up
spawning salmon each February.
A Canadian
naturalist told us that bird watching is a growing trend among
Canadians. I guess they only need to use the non-eagle pages of
their bird books.
Copyright Jeff Lewis, 2004. |
