If you follow me on Instagram, I've been sharing my love of birds in my stories and my feed. Creatively, I've had fun practicing how I want to line up and expose shots on my camera, and then using some of the imagery in art projects. Sometimes, I take people bird watching "with" me by asking them to spot the bird hidden in a photo I've taken of a tree, or by simply sharing some of my adventures in bird watching.
This week, I shared a photo of a bald eagle that I spotted while walking in the canyon with a friend on Sunday.
I'm share two photos here to give you some perspective.
The first photo is still slightly zoomed in. When I was spotted this eagle, to the human eye, it was a dark smudge at the top of this tree. I could tell that it was a very large bird of prey, though, even without binoculars or my zoom lens.
The second photo is of course a zoomed in view of the eagle, what I couldn't see without binoculars. This tree sits above a river so I'm sure it's a good perch for this eagle to look for fish as well as other tasty food.
My sister-in-law sent me this link:
Which takes you to this YouTube live feed of an eagle's nest.
This is a camera that has been set up in Big Bear Valley in California, that is operated with solar panels so that the nest does not need to be disturbed by humans. This eagle laid two eggs (one on January 6 and one on January 9) but her first egg was stolen by a raven while she was away from her nest.
The below image is just a screenshot so go here or here to YouTube if you want to go to the live feed and watch live activity at the nest. I haven't been watching when her mate showed up but there's a live chat where people talk about the two eagles (Jackie and Shadow).
Once in a while she stands up and moves around and nudges her egg, so I took a couple of screenshots so you can see that happening:
At one point while I was watching yesterday see she took a nest break. However, she's not far away. If you look carefully, (and I watched her get up and leave), she just moved over to a branch that is slightly behind the thicker branch on the right side of the image.
When you're out walking around, take some time to look toward the top of trees. I think you'll be surprised to realize how many birds of prey surround you. In one week, just in my neighborhood, I observed red-tailed hawk, cooper's hawk, and sharp-shinned hawk. The last two look almost identical so it was only afterward, in reviewing photographs, that I could be sure that they were two different types of hawks. I saw the eagle I photographed above only a couple of miles away from the three different types of hawks I spotted, which were all in a half-mile radius and a couple of houses over from me.