Bald Eagle almost dropped fish on my head.

Luke

Luke

Member
Joined
May 18, 2010
Messages
250
I was fishing Penns Creek last Friday in the C&R project water in the first split water. A huge splash happened about 15 yards down stream like something fell from the sky. I looked up and saw a pair of bald eagles. I think one dropped a fish back into the creek.

I guess even the bald eagles take C&R seriously!
 
I saw two ospreys down there this past weekend. Upstream of the C&R section about 2 miles.
 
I very well may have mistaken Ospreys for Bald Eagles. Thanks.
 
That is a possibility, ospreys are more fish-catching oriented than bald eagles. Did the birds look like they had a black and white body? If they did, it was a osprey. I wouldn't doubt there being bald eagles down there though.
 
That's awesome! It could have been either really. If the wing tips were pointed toward the back of the bird a bit they were probably Ospreys, but I have been seeing a ton of Eagles around the last couple years. Saw one on that section of Penns a few weeks back
 
He was C & Ring the trout.
I've seen 2 Ospreys, this year, including 1 today. They are arriving late this year.
The way you tell the difference between a B.E. and an OS. is the way the wings look, a B.E. always glides with the wings stretched out straight like a plank of wood, and they have very board wings front to back. An Osprey always looks like the wings are bent at the elbow very much like most gulls. Ospreys are black and white all over the underside. B.E. immatures are mostly black with a lot of white that is quite random all over.
Both eat mostly fish.
 
15 yards is a pretty good distance. How bigs your head?
 
It's all relative...

My head was bigger before I realized that I may have mistaken Ospreys for Bald Eagles.
 
Here is the deal with the eagle/opsrey misidentification phenomenon.

If you think you saw a Bald Eagle then it wasn't a bald eagle. The vision is so striking even in the sun the tail or head is clearly white against a black torso. Unless its a juvenile...then well maybe but they are a bit smaller.

On a clear view an osprey is more uniformly colored on the underside and top side.

Its like mistaking a black angus cattle with a belted galloway.

Everytime someone says to me on the stream I think thats a bald eagle, before I look up I say I bet it isn't they say how did you know...I say because you wouldn't have said you thought it was, it would have been an exclamation "there is a Bald Eagle!"
 
I had a pigeon poop on my shoulder once. Definitely not an Eagle.
 
We had an interesting eagle encounter while fishing on the lower Yellowstone River, below Livingston, MT several years ago.

A friend of mine hooked and released a sizeable brown trout (18-19") while we were anchored in my drift boat on the upper section of a long flat pool - kind of like the Broad Water pool on Penns, Luke, only larger and longer. The trout had been hooked deeply, and we weren't sure he would make it when we released it, but he swam off, heading down river.

As we remained anchored for for several minutes, we looked downriver toward the tail of the pool, maybe a half mile distance, and saw a bald eagle swoop down and grab what was surely the trout we had just released from near the surface of the water. He struggled a bit with that trout to get airborne, but once he gained elevation, he flew directly back upriver toward us, dropped the trout in the grass on the river's edge directly across the river from us, and perched above the trout in a partially dead cottonwood tree.

As if that wasn't enough, as we sat anchored watching that bald eagle, over the course of the next few minutes, 4 more eagles (including a golden eagle) flew in, and landed. Three bald eagles landed in the cottonwood above the trout in the grass, and the golden eagle and the other bald eagle perched on a high rock cliff on the opposite side of the river. We theorized that these eagles had been soaring high overhead, out of our vision, but had seen the trout and had come to fight over what would be a good meal. I'm sure they all knew the trout was laying in the grass, but none of the eagles would go down to get him while we were there.

I spend the entire summer on the Yellowstone River but that is the most eagles I have ever seen together at one time, although we see eagles and osprey practically every day. I understand that that particular area has the largest concentration of golden eagles in the country.

John
 
Not local but I will tell you a great Eagle story from last summer. On our annual trip to Sanibel Island FL my wife and I were fishing from Blind Pass beach. I had decided to fish the inlet so I grabed a rod an headed a yards away and missed this event. A " tourist fisherman" was near my wife fishing and somehow hooked a small Snook. He beached the fish and in my wife's explanantion was clearly afraid of the fish and struggling to remove the hook to release it back into the gulf. After dropping it a few times my wife finally asked if she could help him out. She removed the hook and carried the now almost dead snook back to the water. Putting the fish back a wave carried the fish no more then 15 feet off shore and as she watched a mature Bald Eagle swooped down and grabbed the Snook. She said she almost peed her pants along with a dozen or more people standing near by. She just remarked this weekend ( As we packed fishing gear for this years trip) how remarkable it was to see a BE so close...

Bill A
 
Either way, eagle or osprey. Birds of prey are very cool. And always great to see.

GenCon
 
The people that fish oxbo lake in Wyoming county don't really care for the osprey,There hate being out fished and watching the big ones fly away,I think its cool as shhhh.
 
Back
Top