A tourist approached the feeding eagles and drove all but the least confident flier off. She told me she was afraid the non-flier was hurt. What did she think she could do to help? It remained on the sand for twenty minutes or more and then flew away south.

We had never before seen five bald eagles at once on our beach. Clutch size of eagles has been rising ever since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring alerted the general public about the dangers of DDT. (Before we began poisoning crops, bald eagles in Chesapeake Bay had clutches of four or, rarely, five eggs. The average size clutch was 2-3. In the 60s this dropped mostly to 1 egg. Average clutch size has been slowly rising ever since the banning of that poison.*) Gary assumed bald eagle laid 2 at most “Like normal birds” (he means pigeons). I had not known eagles ever hatched 3 eggs. But here they are.

These parents, the successful breeding pair, have brought out their youngsters each late spring. Inevitably the youngster lands on the beach, finds her or his feet on flat and wet sand and stands in the shore, often for many minutes. Eagles always look a little bit pissed off. It is their expression formed by keen eyes and a downturn in their sharp beaks. I like to imagine they are unhappy with the wet and flat ground, an unfamiliar surface.

Whenever an eagle shows up, crows arrive to harass it. (Crows routinely harass the red-tails too.) We once watched an eagle harrying an injured gull, that itself was then bullied by a half dozen crows. Eventually, even gulls arrived to drive the eagle away. The adolescent eagle moved off north, stood for a time on the sand, but that injured gull would be eagle food before the day was out.

We never interfere. These are wild things and their lives should now be messed about by human being. (It is a different situation when the animal is endangered as a result of human action to begin with.)

The five eagles from the other morning were eating a large fish, the remains of a huge sturgeon—head and spine were thrown up on the rocks by that night’s high tide.

That is the head of a sturgeon, the prize that attracted ten raptors to our shore.

The breeding pair always appear smaller than their youngsters. They are relatively new to our area. When we moved to my grandfather’s house forty years ago, there were no eagles (no ravens then either). This pair, the ones we like to think of as “our eagles,” appeared more than a decade ago and began bringing out their adolescent children soon after. This is the first year they have successfully raised three.

This photo shows the two white-headed parents and their three plain brown children, plus a couple of crows. This is only part of the show.

It was a spectacular day for raptors. In the sky and on the beach we counted the five eagles, three turkey vultures (also a first) and two other raptors that Gary thought might be the osprey, which we have identified recently fishing just offshore. (A neighbor claimed they were red-tail hawks and there are red-tails a dozen miles north on the other side of Tillamook Head, but we did not see the telling red tail and we know to look. We have recently identified Cooper’s hawks in our own yard, but they are smaller than the birds we saw. The pair were probably ospreys, but I do not have a photo to prove it.) The entire local murder of crows arrived, the raven pair too.

In any event, ten raptors at once. Ten.

They are one sign of a healthy ecosystem.

*I do not know any high school science teacher who routinely assigns the work of Rachel Carson, the Great Parent of the modern environmental movement. Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and already a published author when a friend wrote to her about how spraying had caused songbirds to drop dead from the trees in her yard. Because it was not her field, Carson tried for some time to find someone within that discipline to write about the dangers of pesticides, but there were no takers. The chemical industry was and remains a powerful lobby. Finally, Carson did the research and wrote the book herself, knowing full well the chemical industry would do whatever it took to destroy her. They did.