My first bald eagles. Humble attempt.

So it was my first trip to the Mason Neck State Park just south of Washington, DC to see some eagles (for the first time). Oh boy was I excited!

I did spot this one with both converters on a 500. 100% crop! Saw where it landed. Took me a good 10 min to find it within all those leaves and a minute FOV. Oh, yeah, need better manual focusing techniques.

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Yes the Second Shot is a Juvi Bald Eagle, By it's looks a first or maybe Second year Fledgling!!

Lucky find, seeing the one in the tree. They can be hard to spot even when all the leaves are down. You Southern boys might not know about that part.

I doubt the boats scare them, but all the exhaust rises up and hangs in the trees. They probably can't stand it any more than we could.

Thanks hTr.
You are probably right, canonloader. I will have to take a day off some time early september and go there for the whole day when all those boatowners are back to work.

Well, eagles mostly eat fish they catch. They need big water, more or less, to do it good. When they find a good spot, they will use it often, but they have wings and use them. Unless they have a nest, there is no need for them to stay in one spot, and I have never heard of them doing that. They do have territories though and your likely to see them at one spot a number of times, but not like they hang out there, just visit it on their rounds. I have gotten to thinking of them like deer. A big territory, but one with boundaries none the less. They stay within it.

Mason Neck Park is a refuge actually, and there are several rookeries. The place where Potomac river flows in Chesapeake Bay is pretty much one of the few places where there are eagles. I know, Mitch, this is not that interesting to you, but I was looking for this kind of information here and there. At least some people in Northern Virginia might find it useful.

Well, it is interesting to me. I live to shoot eagles, but we only get them in one general area when it hits 20 below and freezes all the water in the Northern Midwest. Everything else during the year is just practice.

But I also lived in Silver Spring for 15 years and spent hundreds, maybe thousands of days and nights fishing and hanging out on the Maryland side of the bay, right where the Potomac runs into the Bay. I'm just saying, you can not depend on an eagle to be anywhere specific unless they have a nest in that area and only during nesting season. As soon as the young have fledged, they abandon the nest and all it's little bugs for the rest of the year.

I see. is there a good resource where I can read on their behaviour and life in general?
Thanks.

I particularly like the second image of the immature. Since you have "Image Editing Ok" i've done a quick (3-4 seconds)adjustment to the Gamma Correction on the second image to bring out more details.

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Thanks Stephen. It does look better.

Sorry I should have also mentioend that if you've taken these in RAW format you can probably recover a lot more details that what I've done so quickly. Also use of an external flash would have helped lighten the underside of the bird as well.

I don't know of anything specific. I just pick it up from here, surfing different sites and my own personal observations over years of watching them. There are a few places in Alaska where eagles are common all the time, but people actually feed them or they hang out where fishing boats dock and there are a lot of scraps.

Stephen Stephen wrote in post #6130344
Sorry I should have also mentioend that if you've taken these in RAW format you can probably recover a lot more details that what I've done so quickly. Also use of an external flash would have helped lighten the underside of the bird as well.

I did take this in RAw and will play with it at home a little bit. As to flash - this one was a tight crop on a 500. I doubt the flash bracket would have helped. But I could be wrong.