Year of the Eagle

Finished taking all the beach-at-sunset pictures we could manage, husband, dog, and I turned and retraced our footprints back toward camp. A huge dark bird hove into sight ahead of us. The eagle soared right over us, its bright head and tail feathers tea-stained by the failing light. A second bird, the same size and silhouette, but lacking the coloring, soared several yards behind it. And that one was trailed by some yards by another adult bird. An eagle family returning to its evening roost, even as we were heading back to ours?

This year, the year I will be marking the passage of my first half-century on the planet, eagles seem to have become my guardian spirits. Normally I could count an entire year’s eagle sightings on one hand, and half of those I would have to go out looking for. But this year….walking the dog through the neighborhood, driving back from town along the Multnomah Channel, strolling on the beach scanning the sky for seabirds, I have encountered the great birds at least a dozen times just in these first few months of 2005. And not so high above my head that I could barely make out their signature coloring against a bright sky. But close by, just skimming the treetops…or sitting on a branch tossing nervous glances over a feathered shoulder as I stood below and gushed, like the hopeless seventies hippie I am, about its beauty and…major coolness.

It appears that the Great Spirit has chosen to send the escort I could not have hoped to ask for, to guide me into the second half of my life. Some naturalists disparage bald eagles as nothing but thieving fish hawks; Benjamin Franklin thought them so lowly that he preferred exalting the turkey over the bald eagle as the national bird. What do they know? I’ll take John Denver’s opinion over theirs any day. Eagles have always meant wildness and freedom and nature’s majesty to me. I will never cease to feel a thrill of discovery, the sense that I have witnessed something rare and untamed, when I spot an eagle wheeling overhead or sitting sentinel on a towering snag. I don’t know what I’ve done, nor what it means, that I have, at least for the moment, such a noble guide. I’m sure it means something. Something beyond my poor, nearsighted dreams. I’m so looking forward to discovering what that may be.