The eagles...

Saturday, after a nice breakfast, Judy and I drove out to Ft. Gibson Lake dam to look for eagles. It was a warm and windy day. Sometimes when the day is too warm or the wind too strong or the time of day is not right, the birds will be nesting. This day, however, the eagles seemed to be enjoying soaring on the strong wind currents high above us. It was a good day. In this first picture, I am pointing to a couple of young eagles who are sitting on the little metal roof just above one of the dam gates. You can't see them, but the picture kinda shows what the day was like.

I don't think Judy ever say the birds that landed on the dam, but I enjoyed looking at them. I guess they were waiting for a fish to come into view. But in the picture below is the nice results of our trip. We saw about 10-12 eagles, maybe more. Most of them were young and didn't have the white heads yet. I think an eagle has to be 3 years old before they have the white head. But we saw a couple of them. One landed in a tree across from where I am standing in the above picture. The other flew overhead with the young eagles. (In my computer setup, I can click on the picture and it will fill the screen. If yours is set up that way, you can see the eagle very close up. If you can enlarge the first picture, you will see two eagles just above my head across the river, and one just above the hill in front of my pointed finger.)

Eagles are very big, with a huge wingspan (maybe about 6'), but when they are way up in the sky, they don't look so big. The thing that really amazed us is how they flew. While the other birds (egrets, etc.) were constantly flapping their wings, the eagles never flapped their wings. Whether they were climbing up or coming down, they just soared on the wind currents with their wings locked out and used the end feathers of their wings to adjust for up and down and speed. It is incredible. You should take the opportunity to watch them if ever you can.