One evening at Little Tutka Bay, while I finishing dinner, one of the other guests came to my cabin and informed me that they had been out fishing and were busy cleaning the fish, and would soon be done, leaving the scraps for the area birds to feast on. I quickly finished dinner, grabbed my camera and tripod, and headed down the hill to the beach. When I arrived, there were already 3-4 adult Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) circling and landing in nearby trees. I set my tripod up so that I could catch the eagles as they flew from the trees to the fish scraps. Within minutes, the show began.
Here is one of the adult eagles, landing in a nearby tree:
The eagles seemed to work off a simple game plan … first, land in a nearby tree and check out the area for any danger. Once convinced there was no threat, they would launch from the trees and head straight for us (the food was off to my left about 100 feet … didn’t want to be too close as to stress the eagles):
Once an eagle would get close to where I was standing, it would make a sharp righthand turn and head straight for the fish scraps:
Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good shots of the eagles picking up the food. Since they were heading away from me when they picked up the fish, they were not in a good position to photograph. But it was still really cool to see these majestic birds coming in to get the fish scraps. The eagles had more issues with the numerous gulls around the fish, than they did with us standing a short distance away.
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