A Chattahoochee Riverwalk Journal: The Eagle Sighting!

You’ve probably already read about our eagle sighting of Friday, but the story and images are so “spread out” in those Facebook status postings that I thought I’d consolidate them here. Here’s what happened: At about 11:30 Friday morning I was pulling my car into our driveway, talking on my cellphone to sister Ginger when I spied, sitting on the ground directly across the street from our front door, what I knew immediately to be a very special bird. Here’s a photo from our front porch, without the bird, just to give you a notion of how close he was to our front porch -- and to me! The bird was perched on the ground, right adjacent to the power pole. My car and I were in the street, to the left of the front gate, about halfway between our front door and the bird.

When I spied him, my first thought was “eagle,” but then I noticed that the bird lacked some of the “classic” features I associate with “eagle,” so I backed off and said to Ginger, “Well, maybe it’s some sort of hawk and not an eagle; but, no, I think it’s an eagle.” The “classic” eagle features “our bird” lacked revealed themselves, after some research, to be the features of a BALD eagle. That’s the one we see on coins, flags, and all such as that. What Fred and I had in our front yard, we figured out after a while, was a GOLDEN eagle. Its head is smaller than a bald eagle, and his coloring is different. He’s brown and gold all over. The first feature that alerted me to the fact that he was a really special bird was, of course, his size – but the second feature was the size of his legs! That bad boy (or girl) had some legs! You know the term “bird legs”? Well, this bird didn’t have ‘em. No, no. This bird’s legs were way thick with feathers, all the way from his body down to his toes. He looked almost as if he were wearing a pair of cowboy chaps.

What happened was, I sat there in the car for a couple of minutes, watching the bird while he sat and preened a bit. Then I ended my conversation with Ginger so that I could use my cellphone to call Fred to come out of the house and take pictures. Fred came right on out and shot these images before the bird flew off toward the River.