Watching the nest
A day with the urban eagles · January 11, 2005
On January 11, 2005, I brought my camera to watch the eagles. I had been seeing them together since the start of the new year. Their tree was visible from Highway 295 south, but that day I found a view from the hill by the houses. I could see them up close.
One bird flew from the tree, and I got the photograph. The other followed. I was so excited that I missed that second bird. That moment stayed in the journal: what I saw, what I caught with the camera, and what happened too quickly.
My attention kept coming back to the nest. I wrote about a young eagle being chased by the two mature birds. I wondered whether it was the young bird from the previous year still hanging around, and what that might mean for the next nesting season. Those were questions I was trying to understand while watching.
The entry also looks back to the year before. I remembered the female sitting in the nest on eggs. By writing that down in January 2005, I kept a record of observations that reached back into 2004.
The journal lets us return to that day. The tree, the nest, the birds taking flight, and the questions were all part of the experience. The photographs held what the camera could catch. The words held what I was still thinking about.
Read the original journal
The complete original page preserves the observations and questions recorded that day.
