Upde Designs

A full five-day work week this week.  I’ve had a four-day work week the last three weeks so this is going to seem like a long week.  Saturday Jeanne and I drove up to Guttenburg, Iowa to see if the eagles were still busy around the dam.  It was about 20 degrees with a light wind but it was uncomfortably cold none the less.  The river ice had changed in the week since I was last there.   Where I stood and shot images of eagles last week was no longer there.  The ice had moved closer to the dam and there were no eagles sitting on the ice.

So we moved closer to the dam, which limited the shooting range because of the fences around the dam.  The good news was there were lots and lots of eagles fishing just below the dam.  When we first were parking the car on the main street by the dam a mature eagle with a fish in his talon was being chased by a juvenile who wanted to take it away.  They came close enough I could have gotten a frame filling image with a 70 mm lens.  Unfortunately the camera and lens were in the back seat and I was still strapped in with my seat belt.

I’ve heard of deer hunters getting what is called “Buck Fever” being so excited they couldn’t pull the trigger.  That’s what I felt when they flew over, I don’t remember ever being that close to a wild eagle in my life.  Some good news about the lens.  It never miss behaved once Saturday.  I shot 1,140 images and not one black frame in the bunch.  🙂  I have a ton of out of focus images but that was all 100% my error.  I don’t know why I shoot some many frames when I’m shooting eagles.  I know what works and what doesn’t but I get pretty excited I guess and try to capture every thing that happens.

My good Friend Dave told me something about the fishing below the dam that eagles do.  He said that when fish go through the dam many times they get stunned and will float on top of the water for a period of time.  It makes easy pickings for the eagles soaring overhead.

The most interesting thing I saw Saturday was the number of attempted take aways.  Mostly from juvenile eagles who would time after time hit the water for a fish only to come up empty-handed.  I have tons of images showing that to be the case.  But a mature eagle would catch a fish and there would be one or two juveniles trying to grab it away from the mature eagle.  I have seen some of that before but not to the extent I did Saturday.

We stayed at the dam for about an hour and then decided to come home through the country.  Saw a lot of barns I should have photographed but the sunlight was pretty harsh and so I passed on all of them.    Thank you for checking out the blog.  I hope you enjoy your Monday.  I’ll have some non-eagle images tomorrow.  Be careful.