Tag: Wildlife

Do Not Feed the Eagles

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Someone was feeding eagles yesterday.  I don’t know if it was my idiotic  neighbor who thinks it is his god given right to feed wildlife, or if it was accidental feeding from an offload of a fishing boat.  Or if someone cleaned out their freezer.  But someone was feeding the eagles yesterday.  This led to at least 3 hours of thumps on the roof, fights and squabbles over both food and advantageous perching, and eagles whizzing down the street at about head height.  And I’m not talking three or four eagles.  I am talking about seventy-five.  Very irritating…and dangerous.

On the spur of the moment

My friend Zoya, who is a crazed walker and runner, called just as I was getting ready to take my husband some lunch at work.  The wind was muffling her voice so I knew she was outside.  She says “I am out at Priest Rock (I know she means Little Priest Rock) and there are so many seals sitting on the rocks, about 12 of them.  I’ve never seen so many together and they are so big.”  I verify that they are seals and not sea lions.  “Oh no, they are seals and they are so fat.  You should come take some pictures.”  (And you have to read this with an Armenian accent, by the way.)

By the time I got out there after going all the way over to airport to drop off lunch, they had decreased in numbers to about 9.  But they were so roly poly fat.  And all different colors.  Just basking away the afternoon in the winter sun;  sharing space with Emperor geese who were grazing in the near shore waters.

There are actually 8 harbor seals, but one is kind of on the other side of the rock.

There is nothing better than being able to drive out Summer Bay road in January.  Typically we are unable to drive it past November due to snow and avalanches.

This fatty had a rock all to himself.

And there is nothing better than living in a place where a spur of the moment phone call from a friend equals basking harbor seals…

I love how they relax!

…and feasting fowl.

I'm assuming these guys were grazing on mussels.

Thanks, Zoya!

Bald Eagles…learning to live with them

The bald eagle is Alaska’s largest resident bird of prey.  It can have a wing span of up to 7 ½ feet and weighs in between 8 and 14 pounds.  Females are typically larger than male eagles.  In the early part of the 1900’s, some Alaskan residents thought that bald eagles were competing with humans for salmon.  A bounty was put on eagles from 1917 to 1953.  A payment between $.50 and $2.00 was given for every pair of bald eagle talons that were turned in to the Alaska territorial government.  Records show that the territorial government paid for 128,000 pairs of bald eagle talons during these years.  Although the bald eagle population was never at peril in Alaska, precipitous declines were seen in both the reproduction and populations of bald eagles in the lower 48 states.  After the banning of the pesticide DDT in 1972, populations began to slowly recover and it is no longer considered endangered or threatened.

In Unalaska we have no shortage of bald eagles.  In fact, they are so common that we did not even pay any attention to them until tourists started gracing our shores.  It became apparent that our ‘common’ was their delight.  Tourists are adamant about getting their pictures of bald eagles.  You’ll see tourists  standing in the middle of the road taking a shot.  They come into your yard with their cameras at the ready.  They scramble up steep, rocky slopes to get  better composition in their shot.  When I think about the eagle pictures I have taken over the last 30 years, I can pretty much say that I have taken probably 10 to 15 pictures of eagles that were not accidental pictures.  By accidental, I mean that I took a picture and an eagle happened to accidentally end up in it because they are just all over the place.

But there seems to be no getting around the fact that we have a plethora of eagles.  With our growing population we have also had eagle incidents where we have had eagle attacks on the heads of humans who have inadvertently wandered too close to eagle nests.  Unfortunately this “wandering” is simply walking down the sidewalk that happens to be next to a cliff where an eagle has built its’ nest.  So we teach our children to give eagles a wide berth, though it can be difficult at times when they just come walking across your lawn.

fishing in june 003a

It’s a little difficult to ignore them when your mother inadvertently dumps the guts from cleaning fish within 50 feet of where you are tending the fish net.

My husband, a reformed commercial fisherman, calls them vultures.

They line the roof when you are out basking in the Aleutian sunshine.

Okay. I'll admit they are probably eyeballing the fish.

They sit on the school roof and play in the playground.  Sorry kids, no recess today.

Look really close and try to count them all. Hint: there are some on the ground.

They are on every light pole.  You learn to give the area around the poles a wide berth.  And you certainly make note of which way the eagle is positioned so as not to be given a poop bath.

Look at those talons extended for the landing.

They don’t care if the pole is already taken.  They will share.

A juvenile and adult bald eagle.

Even if it gets crowded.

Three to a pole, though not uncommon, is stretching the limit for space.

They are in the grass…

This eagle was possibly stunned. When I returned later, he was gone.

They perch on rocks…

I always wonder how they survive the winter.

They find a perch on all types of industrial equipment.

Don't leave your equipment idle for too long. Someone might build a nest.

So having lived all but 22 years of my life among eagles, nothing should surprise me.  Boy was I wrong about that.  I went to the landfill today.  It is always heavily populated by eagles and ravens.  No big deal.  I backed up to the facility, got out and got one heavy bag of garbage out of my car and one very light bag of garbage.  I had the heavy one in my left hand, and the light one in my right hand.   When I was within about 3 feet of the residential dumpster, I saw a blur of motion that turned out to be an eagle, with claws extended, coming straight for my face.  I whipped that light garbage bag up in the nick of time and smacked that eagle away from me.  If it had been the heavy bag in that hand, I never would have gotten it up in time.  And if I did, I probably would have done some damage to the eagle.  As it was, no feathers were lost, and just the landfill employee and I had heart attacks.  I can’t believe how lucky I was.  And I actually am having a hard time believing that my reaction time, my reflexes, and my total ninja-ness were so incredible.  I saved myself.  I’m my own hero today.