Tuesday, September 23, 2008

A good eagle

One of the birds that has always been observed along the coasts of Baja California, is the sea eagle.

A most shy animal that will fly away when a human is even still far away.
Mostly alone, sometimes there is company and they make strong shrieking sounds.

Sea eagles make large nests of branches and for example near Guerrero Negro these nests can be seen on top of telephone poles.

Most spectacular of sea eagles is the way they catch their food.
They eat fish.
To catch one they fly against the wind along the shoreline looking down.
When they see fish they make themselves fall down like a Stuka airplane.
They fall on the water surface with their feet and claws spread out.
They grip with their feet the fish and get airborne again.
Most funny is to see them shake themselves in midair to get the water off their feathers.
With the fish in their claws they fly to the hinterland to land on top of a cactus.
Where they eat the fish ripping the animal apart with the large and sharp beak the sea eagle has.

The sea eagle is a very individual animal.
Not like sea gulls who live in large groups for protection and company.

Sea eagles like to sit on driftwood on the beach to look around and wait for fish to come close to shore.

In a gesture of friendliness to the sea eagle, dead trees washed ashore have been erected to offer a comfortable place for them to watch and wait.

And this worked.
As of several days, a sea eagle uses the offered service.
The bird sits on the tree for hours until it is time to care for dinner.






Nature is now very hard on the person who insists staying at “Estero del Tomate”.
Strong winds driving crazy, bitten to death by billions of insects and bothered permanently by trillion of flies.
But in all this misery there is the sea eagle that is in permanent view and feels like a friendly companion in this situation.
Harmony here, at least with one animal.







.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The "sea eagle" is more correctly called the Osprey, Pandion haliaetus. It's more closely related to falcons than to eagles and hawks. Osprey are unusual in that the same species is found on all continents save Antarctica.