Gordon The Golden
For
several years, I've been watching a golden eagle from my fishing shop
that I've come to call Gordon. There is a big, stripey rock formation
called Sleeping Indian Mesa just across the river, and it dominates the
view from everywhere around. Gordon can often be seen sitting in a dead
tree on top, watching the pasture below for lunch in the form of the
many gophers who live down there. Sometimes he just hovers in place a
thousand feet in the air without moving a feather, wings canted just
perfectly to catch the thermals. Then, he'll see some unwary gopher,
tuck his wings tight to his body, and rocket down to the ground like a
missile. At the last moment, his wings open wide and with talons
outstretched, grabs the gopher in one fell swoop, and flies back to some
cliffside perch with his lunch companion. With so many gophers living
on the property, seeing eagles catch them is a fairly common
occurrence. Watching eagles do their thing can be hypnotizing. We do
occasionally see bald eagles as well, for there is a large nest just
down the river from my shop, but they don't hang around for long since
this is Gordon's neighborhood.
My
mother-in-law is also a fan of the eagles, and a few years ago we
pooled our resources to transform a dead tree on the property into a
carved eagle as a birthday present for her. When they bought their
place in 2006, there was a large, beautiful cottonwood tree growing
where their irrigation water emerged. The tree was eighty feet tall and
had a graceful, arching shape like an elm. Then a neighbor needed a
place to pasture some horses, and my in-laws offered their pasture as a
temporary place for them to stay. Over the few months the horses were
there, they got bored, and bored horses often engage in a behavior known
as "cribbing", in which they chew on fenceposts, barns and trees. In
their time in the pasture, the horses chewed all the bark off the
cottonwood that they could reach, and within a couple of years the
cottonwood tree died.
Driving
past the tree whenever we visited the in-laws used to sadden me. That
tree was so perfectly shaped and healthy, seeing it in that state was
rather depressing. Then one day I was in Glenwood Springs, and noticed a
tree in front of a house on Grand Avenue that had been carved into two
eagles fighting over a fish, with a pair of bears below looking up at
them. I got thinking that maybe whomever had created it could do
something similar with our tree. So I knocked on their door one day,
and got the name of the artist who lived in Delta. For my
mother-in-law's birthday that year, we all kicked in some funds to pay
for our tree to get transformed from the sad dead relic it was into a
unique work of art. The artist charged $700 per day, and in two and a
half days using a variety of chainsaws completed his task. The result
was amazing. He put a level of detail into it that defies description.
Every feather, talon and even the eagle's facial expression are
incredibly well rendered. People driving through the area who are aware
of it have been known to come all the way down to their property just to
look at it.
Watching
Gordon for as long as I have, I knew that he had to have a nest up on
those cliffs somewhere but could never figure out where. Then one day I
was running a river shuttle, and up near Jack Flats noticed a Colorado
Parks and Wildlife truck with a woman standing up in the bed of it
peering into a spotting scope. There had been bighorn sheep in the area
that spring, and I assumed that she was looking for them. We pulled
over to talk to her, and she said that she was looking for eagles, not
sheep. I told her that I didn't know where there were any eagle nests
in Jack Flats, but that there was an eagle living somewhere close to my
shop. She asked if I would show her, and so she followed me there.
As
we pulled down my drive, I looked up into the tree on top of Sleeping
Indian and was disappointed to see that Gordon wasn't in his usual
spot. She got out of her truck and I pointed up to the top of the hill,
apologizing for the fact that the eagle wasn't cooperating. Just after
saying that, he flew right over our heads. She whipped out her spotting
scope, and watched where Gordon was headed. I told her, "I know that
he must have a nest up there somewhere, but I don't know where". After
about ten seconds of looking into the scope, she said, "Got it!" and
offered the scope to me. I looked in, and there was Gordon, sitting on a
small pile of sticks, perched in a cleft in the rock face about three
hundred feet up. Now
that I had a specific place to watch, I bought a spotting scope myself
to keep an eye on Gordon, but didn't see him in that nest very often.
He still spent a lot more time up in his tree, surveying his dominion,
so I'd often show Gordon to my float customers before or after a trip.
Then
one summer my wife's nephew lived on the property, and he took to
shooting gophers out in the pasture with a .22 rifle. I'd notice that
Gordon would hang out above him watching, and when a gopher got shot he
would fly down and snatch it before they would even stop twitching. It
occurred to me that a gunshot was like a dinner bell for Gordon, when he
heard that sound he knew that an easy meal was waiting for him. So I
bought some steel shot shells for my twenty gauge, and built a small
rock cairn that I placed in a spot that Gordon could see from his
perches and that I could see from my shop. One day I saw him hovering
above the pasture maybe 100 feet high, looking at all the gophers
running around below. I used the twenty gauge and shot an unwary
gopher, and instead of just leaving it where it lay, I walked over to
it. I picked it up, and called out to Gordon overhead waving one arm and
loudly calling, "Cheep Cheep Cheep!", which is how I call to ospreys on
the river. I held out the dead gopher so he could see it, and walked it
over to the rock cairn, making sure he could see me. I waved again,
"Cheep Cheep Cheeped!" a few more times, then went over to my shop to
watch. Gordon waited until I was gone, slowly dropped lower in the sky,
and then swooped in to grab his prize. I watched him fly up towards
Sleeping Indian, and he ended up not in his nest but on some different
rocky perch.
Over
the course of that summer, I shot perhaps a half dozen more gophers for
Gordon, and with each one he hung out closer and closer to me.
Sometimes I wouldn't even make it as far as my shop before he
impatiently grabbed his meal. But last summer, the property where that
pasture was changed hands, and it was no longer getting irrigated. The
irrigation used to flood the gopher tunnels, and that would drive them
in large numbers up onto the surface where Gordon or I could get them.
As a result, I was only able to shoot one gopher for Gordon all year.
By June, the grass had grown too tall to even see the gophers any more,
and so Gordon was on his own.
One
of my shuttle drivers Dave who lives on the Derby Mesa Loop Road had a
great view of a golden eagle nest that how could look down into from his
backyard, and those eagles had two eaglets to raise. It got me
wondering if I'd ever have a nest with an eaglet to watch from my
place. Last fall, I began to notice that Gordon had gotten a
girlfriend, and the two of them would engage in some high-altitude
acrobatics. Though I never actually saw them mate, I knew that this
type of behavior was basically eagle foreplay, and that perhaps there
might be a baby eagle to see the following spring. One morning I drove
to my shop and parked round back. I looked up to see Gordon and his new
girlfriend up in the two dead trees on top of the hill. I raised an arm
and loudly called out, "Cheep Cheep Cheep!". They quickly left the
trees, circled around a couple of times, and then tucked in their wings,
which meant they were planning to lose altitude quickly. They did just
that, making a beeline towards me. They came my way like two small
missiles, dropping very fast and zooming past twenty feet over my head.
I couldn't believe the sound they made, it was like a pair of jet
aircraft as they whooshed by. It was absolutely thrilling.
This
year, when I started going round my shop again to get ready for the
coming season on the river I'd see Gordon and his girlfriend (whom I
started calling Glenda) doing their thing. They would either be up on
top in adjoining dead trees, or flying about together. I kept checking
the nest, but there was still no sign of any activity around it. One day
there was a gopher not far from my shop, and I popped it with my
shotgun, and brought it over to the rock stack with Gordon watching me
the whole time. I got back to my shop, and Gordon came down quickly to
get his lunch. I watched him fly back to the cliff using binoculars to
see where he took it, and this time he went to a different spot a little
further west than his old nest. It was immediately obvious that this
was a much more active nest than the one I'd been watching for years,
this one had eagle poop all around it. He left the gopher there and
flew off, and so I set up the spotting scope to start watching that
nest. I didn't see anything else moving in there, but now at least I
had a new spot to keep an eye on.
A
few days later I was back at my shop, and noticed that the gophers had a
new freshly-dug hole about fifteen feet from my shop door, and I could
easily watch it from in there. Sure enough, within minutes a gopher
popped his head out, and was quickly dispatched. Hearing the shotgun's
report, Gordon appeared from nowhere and flew motionless just above, and
this time I watched him again as I flew to the new nest. With the 60X
scope trained on him, he sat in the nest tearing at the gopher, but
there was no sign of either Glenda or a baby eagle. But then I saw a
spot of white, which at first I thought was eagle poop until I realized
it was moving. It suddenly popped up and there it was, a baby eaglet!
The adult eagle was giving the eaglet small pieces of gopher that the
baby eagerly devoured. Gordon was a dad!
I
spent the next hour squinting into spotting scope, utterly transfixed
by what I was seeing. It was a sight that I'd spent years hoping to
see. In the three weeks since, I've shot a half-dozen more gophers,
wanting to do my part supporting the new eagle family. And Gordon
continues to get closer and closer to me after I've loaded up his lunch
buffet rock, once coming so close to my head that I got ready to duck.
When I do feed him now, his normal routine is to carry the gopher up to
the new nest, and then fly towards Glenda to let her know that lunch is
ready. But then he flies back to me at the shop, and hangs out for a few
moments right over my head, as if to say "thank you". And whenever I drive over to my shop now, Gordon usually appears from whatever perch he's been hanging out on to say hello.
Its
been a very windy spring, and I've been worried that the eaglet might
get blown out of the nest. After all, only one of the two eaglets that
Dave was watching that spring made it. After a couple of weeks of
watching two baby eagles, one day there was only one. There were three
days in a row last week when I didn't see Gordon's baby, but then I
finally saw its little white head again, so apparently they chose their
nest site well.
I
don't know how much longer I'll get to watch my eagle family do their
thing, for someday soon the eaglet will be big enough to fly. Hopefully
they'll stay in the neighborhood, and I'll get to watch them for a long
time. But they've already given me some great memories that I'll never
forget!
Jack Bombardier
Epilogue -
Over the next few weeks, the little eagle grew. It went from looking like a little chicken when it was all white, and then looked like a bald eagle when its body turned brown but it's head was white. Then for awhile, it began to appear like an osprey, the back of its head was brown with a white face. Finally it became mostly brown, and I began to see it perched on the edge of its nest, instead of at the back where it used to be It had been one of the windiest springs in memory, and I worried that it might get blown out. I also worried that its first flight could be its last. The nest was above a 200' sheer drop, followed by another 200' foot steep pitch only slightly less vertical.
On a Friday morning, I watched the eaglet for awhile as it sat looking over its domain. Sometimes, it even seemed to look back at me. Did it know that I had been its benefactor for those past few weeks, and that its full belly was due in some small part to me? On Saturday we were busy doing shuttles, and I didn't have time to look for it. I looked on Sunday, and didn't see the eagle, though mom and dad were out and about cruising. Over the next few days, I'd look each morning when the sun was illuminating their abode and didn't see the eagle, or the adults in the nest either. The nest seemed to be empty, and that made me feel a little empty, too. I'd see Gordon and his mate occasionally, and would check the nest only to see, nothing.
A couple of weeks went by, and I had given up on seeing the eaglet. It was probably Gordon's first attempt a parenthood, and now that he was experienced maybe the next time would turn out better. Perhaps the second time around, he and his mate would do a better job of keeping their baby away from the edge. I saw Gordon up in his favorite tree, and then saw Mrs; Gordon flying around, too. I grabbed my binoculars to check the nest, but as had been the case for the past two weeks, there was nothing to see except for the eagle poop staining its flanks. I put the binoculars away, glanced back up, and saw...a third eagle! This one was following the second, but using its wings a whole lot more. Eagles often seem to fly without hardly moving a muscle, they just stick out their wings and magic happens. This third eagle hadn't quite mastered that effortless ability yet, and was flapping its wings like an osprey. It had to be the baby!
Gordon sat in his tree and watched his mate do some flight training, until mother and baby flew into Gordon's tree. For a few moments, all three eagles sat there together and it made me so happy to see that I almost became emotional. Their repose didn't last long though, and soon they were all in the air together and I wished that I could join them. I don't know what the future holds for Gordon and his feathered family, but knowing that the eagle is literally off to flying start feeds my soul!
