Work had really started heating up in January, and I wasn't getting much time to do photography. What time I had in the field was fairly uneventful. I had made a trip on Sunday the 9th to a snowy Maplewood, but found very little bird activity. I had also snuck away on the morning of the 12th to Mud Bay, where a Eurasian Skylark had been reported. I returned without sighting the skylark or getting any decent photos of anything. On top of that, Mud Bay turned out to be an aptly-named destination, and I was happy to have my calf-high rubber boots on, although even they didn't help when I sunk in up to my knee. So I worked that afternoon with a few inches of mud caked around the knee of my jeans. I'm glad I didn't have any important meetings.

So the next day that I really got in the photo groove was Saturday the 15th. I decided to head up to Brackendale, a small community abutting Squamish. Brackendale is well-known for its Bald Eagles. They gather there in the winter to feast on the spawning salmon.

I arrived in Squamish around lunchtime and decided to eat before going to see the eagles. I called my friends Grant and Marcia, who had taken us around Squamish in November. Marcia was out of town, but Grant was free and after I finished eating we went over to Brackendale together. The famous eagle-watching place, Eagle Run, was pretty quiet. Only three eagles were there when we got there, and they were all far away, across the river. I was beginning to think that I was going to be cursed with another day of relative lack of photogenicity. January was not going well.

But Grant knows his town, and he told me that we would probably do better at eagle-spotting a little ways up the road, at another river called the Cheakamus. He drove us on up there, and we got out and started walking a trail alongside the river. Eagles were everywhere: in the trees around us, and flying above the river.

It takes four or five years for a Bald Eagle to reach adult plumage. This bird, with dark head and dark body, is a juvenile, less than a year old.

Some trees just seemed to be favored by the eagles; the most I counted in a single tree was nine.

Off to my left, I caught this juvenile flying out between the trees.

If my fingers ended in razor-sharp claws, I probably wouldn't use them to scratch my nose, either.

As I said earlier, eagles were everywhere in the trees around us. We were able to get fairly close (probably about fifteen meters) to some of them before they flew off. Here's a one-year-old that we were able to get close to.

It seems like a fairly strange habit, as it must cost the bird a fair amount in heat loss through the legs. However, the dipper's preferred food is salmon roe, and sticking your head in seems the best way to find and retrieve it.

Here he's pulled his head out again.

Dippers will stand in one place and dip their head in repeatedly. It's fun to watch them.

We continued on the path, enjoying the hush of the forest after a snowfall, and seeing eagles everywhere we looked.

About thirty minutes after we started out, we turned onto a path a little further from the river for the return walk. Right where we turned, we found a Glaucous-winged Gull, who was at point blank range and didn't mind our presence. I took a few pictures before we headed on.

Note: the next photo is not for the weak of stomach. The ones after it are okay, though.

The path we were on wound through some salmon spawning channels. The salmon runs were pretty much done, and the fish were in a much more advanced state of decay than when I had been nearby in November.

We went over a small footbridge back to where we had gotten on the main riverside trail. There I caught this adult

and this one-year-old.

I guess the gulls weren't worried about the eagle preying on them—either they're not very bright, or they figured that the eagle is too full of fish to worry about prey that can fly.

We walked a little closer to the gull-watching eagle, and I took a few photos of another one- or two-year-old perched on a snow-covered log across the river.

Before leaving, I had one more subject. I found the following hind end sticking up out of the river.

I kept my eye on that tail, and soon the rest of a bird joined it. It was a juvenile gull of some sort, and he'd obviously been taking foraging lessons from a dipper.

That wasn't a fish egg in his mouth, though; he must have adapted the technique to his own ends. I don't know what it was that he got there.

Grant and I headed back to his truck, and went on to check a few other places for interesting birds. We didn't find any, and the light was quickly fading, so my photography was done for the day. All in all, we'd probably seen a couple hundred eagles, and a few other goodies to boot. My trip to see the eagles had turned out quite well.

Smarter than your average gull,
Tom