Late winter in Cedar Rapids is an excellent time to watch bald eagles. They congregate around dams or other spots where the water isn’t totally frozen. When I was a boy, bald eagles were almost extinct in Iowa due to use of the pesticide DDT. But after it was banned, conservationists helped them make a successful recovery. Nowadays they’re a very common site here, but I still get a thrill every time I see one. So, this month, what follows for favorite photos is mostly eagles. (There are a few other birds, too.)
First, here’s a short video in which a mature eagle chases a younger one off its preferred perch above the frozen pond. It follows with a scolding.
There are so many of them!
In certain spots, I’ve seen as many as 30 bald eagles hanging out together.
Aerial roughhousing
There’s probably some official name for this, but to me it looks like the roughhousing and wrestling my siblings and I did when we were kids, except it’s happening while flying a hundred feet or so in the air. This is one of my favorite things to watch in the spring, when the young eagles test their agility against one another.
Click an individual photo to open and see full size. Not all of the photos are super crisp because of the distance, but still fun to look at!
Duck, duck, geese
I also enjoy seeing the other birds on the river: ducks and geese. Here are some mallards coming in for a landing just below the dam where the eagles frequently fish. I just like having a camera that can capture them in flight.
I shot these with a Sony a7R4 with a Sony 200-600mm zoom lens.
Normally geese are annoyingly loud characters, but I like catching them in their quieter moments.
I didn’t know herons stayed for the winter
On one of the coldest days of this winter, I startled three great blue herons. I don’t remember seeing them in Cedar Rapids during the winter before. I’m not sure if they normally winter here and I just haven’t seen them, or if this is unusual behavior. The picture below is a little unclear, but the chunk of ice attached to the heron’s beak illustrates how cold it was that day.
Hope you enjoyed these photos! I had a lot of fun capturing them.