“Bird watching”

The fellow sitting on the tailgate of his pickup truck never realized the show he was missing.

(620 mm effective Focal Length)

The little duck watches as the Eagle speeds straight at him at about 40 mph.

(760 mm effective Focal Length)

With perfect timing, the duck always dove and escaped with a mighty splash! Then he’d pop to the surface
as soon as the Eagle flew past. This was repeated over and over for several minutes. I worried the poor duck
would tire and that would be the end of him.

(1,040 mm effective Focal Length)

A second Eagle joins the attack! The duck kept diving “just in time”, so the Eagles began to dive into the water after him!

(1,150 mm effective Focal Length)

After several minutes the Eagles got frustrated and began to attack each other. They soon began to dive vertically, level out, and attack head-on in a good old-fashioned game of high-speed “Chicken”. Sometimes they banked away each other at the last possible second, other times they’d climb vertically and tear into each other while falling back toward the water. (The duck catches his breath at the right side of this picture.)

(900 mm effective Focal Length)

A terrible miscalculation! The luckiest shot of my life catches this 100 mph head-on collision between two Bald Eagles.

(1,320 mm effective Focal Length)

One Eagle stayed aloft and flew away, but the other lies motionless in a crumpled heap. The lucky duck survived to live another day.

(486 mm effective Focal Length)

It’s sad to watch an Eagle drown. He wiggled, flapped and struggled mostly underwater. He finally got his head above water and with great difficulty managed to get airborne. To my astonishment, he flew straight toward me, and it was the most wretched and unstable bird flight I’ve ever seen!

(620 mm effective Focal Length)

The bedraggled Eagle circled me once – then lit atop a nearby fir tree. He had a six-foot wingspread and looked mighty angry. I was concerned that I might be his next target, but he was so exhausted he just stared at me. Then I wondered if he would topple to the ground. As he tried to dry his feathers, it seemed to me that this beleaguered Eagle symbolized America in its current trials.

(1,200 mm effective Focal Length)

My half-hour wait was rewarded with this marvelous sight. He flew away, almost good as new…
May America recover as well.

(1,400 mm effective Focal Length)