Fish Eagle
It's time to leave the eagles and move on to other animals, charismatic and intriguing. But this final sequence demonstrates one eagle's open-water fishing skills.
We were in the Pass looking for whales one evening. We found them, and in a lull in their bubble-net feeding, an eagle swooped down, grabbed a fish in its talons, and flew off. The fish was much bigger than the little fish the eagles, seen in earlier posts, had been taking along the Auke Bay shore. It might have been a big herring, a small salmon, or a cod. Given the recent bubble-net feeding activity, it might have been an unintended casualty of the traumatic turmoil caused by the feeding whales, and might have been at the surface or floating stunned when the eagle saw it. Regardless, now it was gone, still clutched by the eagle as it flew off, possibly back to a nest to share the meal.
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After a lifetime of mainly expressing myself with words, my postings here will mainly rely on images. They will speak for themselves to some extent, but I'll usually add a few comments of explanation. I've taken photographs for decades, since the 1950's, inspired in part by my father's photographic skill. Four years of photo assignments and quality darkroom time eventually gave way to decades of casual and family picture-taking. I re-immersed myself when I left film and turned to digital.