Category Archives: Eagle Sightings

Please Don’t put up Pictures of Fog

But I like fog.

I like the way it visually cuts me off from my surroundings. This one wasn’t horribly dense, but you could see nothing beyond the trees on the opposite shore of the river barely 100 yards away. Even those were indistinct shades of gray.

In the tree on the left are a couple of bald eagles, no, really.

Fishing in fog like this is one of my favorite things to do. It makes you concentrate and focus on what is readily apparent rather than letting your mind wander on what is down stream and around the next bend. You can’t see the next bend.

This morning I had already been out on my porch listening to the bald eagles talk down on the river. The geese were being unusually noisy this morning too. Maybe because of the eagles. With the air temperatures just above 40 degrees, it was time to go for a walk. We’ve had a long stretch of below freezing temps and this year my bones are paying the price. Today they didn’t feel so bad.

I could tell by the sound that there were a lot of geese along the river. They were thick on the ice and in the shallow water below the dam when I got there. Some were already getting nervous about me walking along the shore and took off.

The geese that hang out around here all year don’t get so nervous. I can always tell how wild the geese are by how close they let you get. The more domestic ones will let you walk right up to them, they get used to people tossing them food. The wilder ones will start honking and moving around, getting agitated.

I decided to make matters worse by walking out on a spit of land that got me even closer to the geese. The honking kept getting louder.

It wasn’t long before they started leaving in small groups.

This kept up for a few minutes.

Till they were all pretty much airborne.

I quickly realized there were now a few hundred pissed off flying crapping machines over my head.

I flipped the hood onto my head and stood on the end of the spit of land to watch what I started. The honking was deafening and there were so many geese low over my head that I could feel the vibrations from displaced air coming off their wings and onto my eardrums. It took them a few minutes to realize I wasn’t leaving and they headed off down stream.

The other benefit of fog is that it deadens the noise of human activity, but I noticed that it had practically no affect on the sound of the birds on the river. I noticed how clearly I could hear the eagles this morning though they were two blocks away. As I walked home in the same direction the geese flew, I could hear them still pissed off and honking, but I couldn’t see them.

I think I’ve always noticed this, but not so distinctly as today. There must be something about the sound waves from their noises that cuts through the fog. I would assume so they can continue to know where each other are even if they couldn’t see each other.

The geese were heading down stream making a ruckus. I could hear them flying around and remembered that there were few places for them to land. The river further down was already filled with birds and I’m sure no further company was wanted. A half hour later I went in the house. The birds were still squawking loudly.

My mother-in-law was sitting in the living room and commented on the sounds of the geese as I walked into the house. She could hear the noise building out on the river two blocks away even in a closed up house.

Yeah, that was me. I decided to have a little fun with the geese.

“They didn’t sound like they were having fun.”

Shooting Out Street Lights

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The other day at 9 PM I stepped out on my front porch to smoke the last cheap cigar of the day. Earlier in the day I spent a couple of hours dismantling and storing away all of the Christmas lights and decorations. My house was now dark again.

Apparently the whole neighborhood had the same idea. Not a Christmas light to be seen. It was dark again on the streets. For the most part.

There was frost on the cars. Odd for this early in the evening. I looked up. The sky was crystal clear. I walked around to the side of my house. There’s a spot where I can stand in the shadows to get away from the glare of a couple of street lights. I looked up again. Directly overhead I could see the slight haze of the Milky Way.

Like the bald eagles I see regularly, the Milky Way is something I thought I would never see while living in the Chicago area. Too many street lights.

I live on a dead end street that is barely a couple of hundred yards long. The house lots are big, so there are few homes. The street ends a little over a hundred feet to the west of me, where the edge of the wooded ravine starts.

Forming a T directly in front of my house is another dead end street, barely 100 yards long. Again, few homes down that way. At the intersection, directly in front of my house, is a street light. It lights up my whole front yard and the front of my house. At the end of the street that T’s in front of the house, it’s pitch black. If the homeowners down at the end don’t turn on any lights, you would never know there were houses down there. Only one in the neighborhood feels the need to leave bogey man lights on all night. Luckily, he lives the furthest away from me.

At the end of my dead end street, we’re not so lucky. I’ve been living here for seven years and I hear that a few years before we moved in, the two homeowners at the end of the street petitioned the city to put up a street light. Now the bright orange glow of a sodium vapor light dominates that end of the street. The two original homeowners that insisted on this are long gone. We have to live with it now.

A few months ago I was standing out in the street, at night, enjoying a cigar. The wife came out on the front porch.

“What the hell are you doing?” It’s more of a statement than an actual question.

Well, I was sizing up the light to see if I can take it out with one shot. It’s kind of tricky cause you have to go through the glass first in order to hit the bulb. If nothing else, two shots at the most, but I have to be accurate.

The sound coming from her was a mix of a sigh, ack, ugh…

“And for some reason you think it’s a good idea to stand in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night and blast away at a street light with a shotgun.”

We both hate that light, we both want it dark so we can sit out here at night and not be annoyed…

“So your solution is to blow it away with a shotgun…”

I never said anything about a shotgun, you’re putting words in my mouth.

“You want to kill a street light, what else am I supposed to say?”

Well, it won’t be a shotgun. I have that air rifle that at short ranges has the same initial velocity as a .22. I’d use that. I’m not so stupid as to go blowing off a shotgun in the middle of the night.

“Oh, of course, that’s right, you just want to shoot out street lights.”

Well, yeah, I guess.

“And you think the neighbors won’t have a problem with this?”

I’ve already talked to the neighbors along here, except for the guy that keeps the bogey man lights on all night. Talking to him is a waste of time, he won’t understand.

“And talking to the neighbors about shooting out the street light isn’t a waste of time?”

It winds up they feel the same way I do about the lights. They like the dark too. A couple of them have encouraged me to go through with my plans.

“Remind me to talk to them about never encouraging you in anything you say.”

Besides, trying to hit street lights with just about anything is a time honored tradition. Starts with rocks, then snowballs, baseballs, footballs, just about anything you can throw. Then one day your parents actually agree to your idea of having a bb gun that’s shaped like an M-1 rifle. It was inaccurate as hell, but pretty powerful. The light and pole in the alley behind their house took a beating. So did the neighbors bogey man light on his garage. And then there was the incident with the windshield on the VW bug. I thought the guy was going to beat me to death with the bb gun…

“You have a point, but grownups outgrow these things.”

Yeah, right. Grownup women maybe, but guys never get over the joy of hearing the sound of broken glass. It’s as American as apple pie. Hell, even Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed did it in It’s a Wonderful Life. Walking down the street in the middle of the night, they start throwing rocks through the windows of an abandoned house. The one guy in the neighborhood that catches them in the act tells Jimmy Stewart…. Why don’t ya shut up and kiss her instead of talking her to death.

That’s the best he could do? Breaking glass as an aphrodisiac? Doesn’t get any kinkier than that and that was in 1946.

Years later there was even a song extolling the pleasures of breaking glass.

“I’m going in the house now. Goodbye.”

You’ll appreciate this once it’s done.

“I will not come get you out of jail. Good. Bye.”

While out Fishing the Other Day

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While I was out fishing a semi urban stretch of the Fox River at the end of January, I was joined by a couple of red tailed hawks and a bald eagle. I wrote it down later like this:

Drifting up stream on the air currents came the large black shape of an eagle. It slowly cruised above the river and occasionally drifted out over the tree tops. The ducks didn’t like any of this. They all lifted off the water. Some seemed to feign an attack on the eagle, a foolhardy gesture at best, but most simply took off squawking.

Once the eagle was out of sight, a couple of red tailed hawks appeared. They seemed to be playing in the treetops feigning bites, then they would take off together to hover over the river. They never got far from each other and it continued to look like they were playing. I’ve never seen them behave like this, usually I don’t see more than one.

Even in somewhat of an urban area these birds have learned to adapt to our presence. The hawks don’t surprise me so much, I’ve been seeing them around for a long time just about everywhere I go. But for an eagle to slip right into these urban areas comes as a surprise. It’s just not something I would have ever expected.

My first sighting of an eagle on the Fox River happened along this same stretch around 2003. Along the shore runs the warmer waters of a treatment plant discharge. During the winter it’s ice free and attracts all kinds of birds. There’s an old dead tree, completely stripped of bark, where the eagle likes to sit and survey the river below. I’ve described this stretch numerous times in the past, but this will do:

For such an urban area, this stretch gives a pretty good illusion of being more remote. On the other side of the river a pretty busy road runs right along the shore. It was just far enough away that any traffic noise is pretty well muffled. Once behind an island it becomes pretty simple to ignore the urban views altogether.

The side with the warm water is a flood plain that’s never been developed. A wide open field of tall grasses, a shore line of trees that create picture perfect undercut banks. Further down the trees become more extensive and cover more of the shore and land. While walking through it, especially in the warmer months, the dense trees and brush obliterate all signs of human artifacts and for a brief time you could be anywhere that people don’t go.

The end of that day had me walking through the field back to my car. I was tracking coyote, which seemed to be tracking squirrel and raccoons. The raccoons seem to take the same paths to and from the river on a regular basis. The squirrel tracks seem to be more sporadic. I’ve heard that they never find 90 percent of the nuts they bury. Their tracks in the snow indicate that they spend a lot of time looking for that 90 percent, even if never found.

From a distance I thought I was seeing pheasant tracks cutting across my path.

When I got up on top of the tracks their size said this was no pheasant. They were as big as my hand. They came from the rivers edge and headed inland. At first I thought they might be from a blue heron, but I’ve never seen a blue heron walk inland like this. I followed the tracks and they took paths through low brush. No 4 foot tall bird would be able to do this. Then at one spot, the tracks disappeared. I looked up the tracks when I got home, definitely an eagle, either out for a stroll or on the hunt.

Further down the trail there were more tracks. These looked just like the others only smaller. This time they appeared out of nowhere and it looked like there was some kind of scuffle.

The scuffle was taken a couple of feet away into some brush. I knew these were the tracks of the red tailed hawk and it was determined to get hold of something.

And then like the eagle tracks, they were gone. Nothing walked away from this scuffle, the victor flew off.

This got me thinking about a trip through West Virginia many years ago. I was on my way to a rod and gun club outside Richmond Virginia for a week to wander woods and fish. I usually went alone and if I was lucky, I would run into no one while there. It was about two in the morning and in the West Virginia mountains I could only pick up National Public Radio, my radio listening choice anyway.

They were discussing The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I remember being bothered by this. I enjoy the peace and quiet of woods and water without the presence people. I prefer the absence of people most of the time. But the peace of wild things is a human construct. We look out at what we believe is beauty. We immerse ourselves in the silence of our surroundings. Gentle breezes rustling through trees while we lay back on a hammock can lull us into sleep.

This got me thinking, wild things don’t experience peace . . .

Fox River Eagles so far for 2011

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It seems that the area ponds froze over sooner than usual. December was a pretty cold month that had almost all of the days below normal. This brought a lot more ducks and geese to the river. More than I had seen in the 14 or so years I’ve been paying attention.

Ducks and geese are food, at least to some predators. The top flying predators around here lately are the bald eagles that have been increasing in numbers with each passing year. This year it seems I started seeing them earlier than usual. That coincides with the increase in possible dinner items I guess.

It’s become an almost daily occurrence to be able to stand on my front porch and watch them cruising the tree tops along the river. Considering I’m at the top of a good 40 or 50 foot tall hill, these birds are cruising at tree top level for the river. For me, they are practically at eye level.

The river is just a two minute walk down the hill. A two minute drive gets me to the Yorkville dam, the thing responsible for keeping this stretch of the river relatively free of ice. I was hanging out there today for a bit. No particular reason. Curious to see what types of birds have been gathering.

The eagle came drifting up the river. I expected all the birds to bolt, but the geese just sat there. Strength in numbers I guess and it probably helps to be almost the size of the eagle. I’ve had some pretty pissed off geese chase me down and along the river. Not sure if even an eagle was willing to put up with that. But the flock of ducks sitting in the shallow rivers didn’t like the eagles presence at all. They gave out a simultaneous squawk and started to jump, but then thought better of taking to the air with that thing around and wound up hitting the water hard only 50 feet away.

Later in the day I was hanging out as usual on the porch. The eagle was heading down stream. The sun was waning and I guess it was heading home. If this is one of the same eagles, there seems to be 4 of them around this year, it’s cruising range for the day is a good 10 miles. I may have to try following it back and forth one day just to see how far they cruise.

So far no pictures. Either I don’t have my camera at hand or the eagle is too far away . . . see that black speck, that one right there!!! That’s the eagle!!!

The opportunity may arise yet.

The influx of waterfowl on the river seems to be attracting other predators. This week besides the eagle, I’ve seen a few red tail hawks, a great horned owl and a number of falcons. Considering the size of these predators, maybe it’s not the waterfowl there after.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t seen the rabbits in the last few weeks.

I am down to 3 squirrels every morning from the usual 8.

Fox River Eagles – Winter 2010

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I wrote this around the first week of February 2010. The eagle sightings seem to be the highest throughout the month of January. Less open water in the area, but stretches of the river can still be open. Seems to attract them.
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The plan on Sunday was to go explore an abandoned and collapsed house I had found near Orchard Road. My daughters seemed to have inherited this exploratory nature from me and Leah was up for a little exploring. Whenever the two of us head out on one of these adventures we get the same warning from my wife . . . if you guys get arrested for trespassing, don’t call me.

I have walked along the area where the abandoned house is for the past ten years. Countless times I have passed the hill where the house sits. I never saw it till the fall of 2009. It stood out like a sore thumb even though there were still a fair amount of leaves on the trees. Funny how you can walk past a spot a hundred times and still find something completely new. I knew now that with the undergrowth gone and some fresh snow on the ground it would stand out even more.

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While trying to find an ice and snow free spot to park the car, we cruised down the road that runs along the river. There was a car parked on the side with a foot long lens sticking out the window. Of course I had to stop to see what they were photographing. It was a bald eagle sitting on a log on the other side of the river. I know this stretch like the back of my hand and where it was sitting is very shallow. Huge schools of carp sit out there sunning themselves even in the summer. To get past the eagle into the deeper channel behind the island, they have to go past the spot where the eagle was sitting. That stretch is so shallow that half the carp sticks up out of the water as they swim the shallows.

Perfect feeding spot.

I took a few shots with my point and shoot, but they pretty much suck. You can tell it’s an eagle, kind of.

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We sat and watched as the eagle launched into the air and starting heading down the river. It’s wings initially looked like the tips were touching the water. I was jealous of the person in the car with the long lens. They were getting some good shots. We went to find our parking spot. The car with the photographer was leaving the area and I had to flag them down. I introduced myself to new found fellow Fox River Valley explorers Larry and Deb Granat. They were kind enough to trust a total stranger wanting to trade email addresses just to get better pictures of an eagle. Winds up that they live about a mile down river from where I live. They had seen the eagle cruising the river up stream and decided to see if they could follow it. They wound up at Saw-wee-kee about 5 miles from where they started.

I need to get me a camera like they have.

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My daughter and I wandered down the railroad tracks east of Orchard Road. We talked of other times I’ve had her out exploring abandoned things. She seems to have picked up another one of my traits. She finds herself thinking about the house, the people that lived there and what their lives must have been like. Why would they just get up and leave a house and never come back. Why not at least give it to someone in their family. Some of the things we’ve found looked like someone was going to be back at any moment, even though we know they had been gone for decades.

This one was different. Mother nature was quickly winning the war.

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The living room area of the house seems to have taken the biggest blows. Trees were growing up out of the collapsed wooden floor.

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We wandered around the house kicking through the snow and piles of stuff that had been dumped all around. A food cellar was about 50 feet away. Ball jars used for canning were scattered everywhere. Old clothes line poles were standing stark amid saplings. An old aluminum coffee pot lay in another heap of garbage.

The open kitchen door looked inviting in an odd way. Waiting for someone to step in.

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Only, part of the kitchen had been dragged out into the yard.

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The old fireplace was the most impressive. Still standing solid. Made of the limestone from the river. It barely showed any wear. Through the collapsed wall of the house you could see into the living room with the fireplace.

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My daughter wanted to go inside to look around, but the floors were too far rotted and gone. Normally this doesn’t stop us, but this house was built up on limestone columns and the floor had collapsed around them. It was impossible to tell if there were any holes under the house. Best this time to play it safe. The kitchen looked like it had been trashed by others that had raided the place, but you could still see the old wallpaper patterns and other decorative touches now sometimes hanging from the walls.

She insisted she had to have one picture of her somewhere in or on the building. We compromised and I let her jump up on a windowsill after thoroughly testing that it wouldn’t collapse around her.

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While we were there we heard red tailed hawks screeching over head. There were 3 of them making a racket. As they came over the clearing where the house stood, we could see that they were chasing the eagle. The eagle landed in a tree practically over our heads, but the hawks attacked it before I could get a picture. The eagle was moving like it was more annoyed then afraid. It never seemed in all that big of a hurry to get away.