Near Chinese Camp a bald eagle glides above Route 120, tracing the battered shore of the reservoir toward Table Mountain. I crane my neck, an avian mixed metaphor. I scream vulgar epithets of joy and gratitude through the windshield.
Tonight the belted kingfisher sat on a low wire beside the creek, a coralline northern sky behind him. He had a fish. A stickleback, perhaps, or a steelhead fry. Steelhead still spawn in the creek’s lower reaches, I’ve heard. There is a barrier a mile and a half upstream that no steelhead can pass. The kingfisher patrols this section of creek, tidal reach to fresh rill, under the San Pablo bridge and toward the elementary school, then back. His shouts echo, trill. Water flows down from Briones past cattails, tules.
A pair of snowy egrets rose from the creek, paced me for a hundred feet as I ran toward the bay.
At the end of my run the sky was indigo, and the kingfisher had gone wherever he goes at night. A gang of ravens mobbed the barn owl, forced it out of the air down by the tracks. It dropped on silent wings into the tall wetland grass, and vanished. The ravens flew off laughing. Large as they were, the owl posed no threat. Owl was a convenient target for the raven’s bored abuse.
I thought of the bald eagle again tonight. Only the third one I’ve seen and it reminded me of the first, an apparition in the cloud-wreathed trees on the Trinity’s south fork, New Year’s Day 2000. It faded in and out of view, moving not a tip of feather.
Or you could come to Minnesota; in early spring the bald eagles are thick along and above the upper Mississippi, south of Lake Pepin. We’ve taken our son (age 6) to see them. He meets our awe and amazement with a ho-hum attitude of “but look, I can see dozens of them right now.” The Colonel is right, of course, and this illusion of eagles aplenty in a limited area is a Potemkin village of ecological health. It’s hard to explain that to a six year old who can make an eagle sound with uncanny accuracy because he’s heard so many.
And you can even come to Detroit and see them. The deep industrial malaise and no DDT has them actually living about 20 miles south of Detroit. There at Lake Erie MetroPark where the Detroit river ends and Lake Erie begins I have seen 3 myself. Each one was such a happy moment. In the fall thousands of migrating birds stream through that opening to the south. The park ranger tells of seeing a golden eagle go over and he is giddy with remembering it every time he tells it at Hawkfest.