Juvenile Bald Eagles
The Black Butte Ranch area of eastern Oregon has always been a gold mine for me photographically. A significant percentage of all the pictures on this website have been taken during the week long "family" vacation we have taken there for 24 years. So this July, 2009, when I arrived monday morning I drove to Wizard Falls fish hatchery to see what was up. I asked whether the staff was feeding a dead fish to eagles each morning as they had done in the past.
"No, not right now. We've got two juvenile eagles hanging around and the Forest Service has asked that we not feed them. They don't want them to become habituated to human activity. They are independent and feeding on their own but they don't want them feeding on handouts alone." I could see two dark hulking shapes behind the manager as he talked, sitting virtually on the rim of the trout holding ponds. Well, if what you have is a lot of lemons, then make lemonade. I went for my big lens and tripod.
After two days and about 5 hours of observation I came to a rather different conculsion than the hatchery manager. These are, I believe, two recent fledglings, just out of the nest. And I believe they are siblings, the same size and with similar fledgling plumage. They stayed together, sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely, always communicating, even if they did several times squabble. And, I believe, they were still occaisonally being fed by their parents, though I never saw that, or had JUST been cut loose to fend for themselves. They never exhibited any serious hunting or feeding behavior, rather seemed to be waiting with bored expectation as a nestling would on the nest.
They also were quite approachable. Although with my big lens I could and needed to keep my distance, once an unknowing jogger walked right under the limb on which the bird I was photographing sat, passing 10 feet under it without flushing the bird.
The sequence will run as a slideshow once started.
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