New Year's Day Sighting

Whenever I'm home, I get to walk the dog with Dad.  The route is usually very minor variations on the same loop around a nearby lake, and we've been walking it, with or without a dog, since I was a kid (with one interruption of a few years when the ownership changed and they didn't want us down there).  When the dog is very lucky, he gets two and occasionally three trips in a single day.  Dad is good about getting him down there twice a day whenever he has the time; when I visit, I try to do the same on the days Dad works and doesn't have the time for a lap around the lake.

A few years ago, before I moved to Oregon, Dad and I heard a low chittering in the trees in one area and looked up to find them dark with bodies.  The leaves had already fallen, so not seeing the silhouettes of limbs was in itself a little odd, but as we got closer we discovered the cause: hundreds and hundreds of cormorants were roosting as one enormous flock.  It was the only night we ever saw them, and we both regretted not taking a camera on a walk that was so familiar as to be unremarkable on the night that something remarkable happened.

For a couple years, a group of seven or eight swans wintered there.  We have also seen beavers, muskrats, wood ducks (they roost in trees, which is makes it--forgive me--an odd duck), and a tiny frog whose size belied the volume of its deafening song.  Herons are fairly common, but sometimes we get to hear them talking in a croaking call that serves as a reminder that their ancestors were dinosaurs.  It is an alien, primal sound, entirely unexpected from such a slender, graceful avian.

I like that a place we know so well can still provide these surprises for us, and on New Year's Day we got another: for the first time ever, we saw a bald eagle at the lake.  We stared at him long enough for him to get annoyed and fly away, but we saw him again towards the end of the walk, and we had a better view there.  The dog had no idea what had us so transfixed, and was even more confused to learn that we hadn't stopped in our tracks to scratch him behind the ears.

Naturally, we didn't have a camera that time, either, and when I raced back from the house after retrieving mine, I saw him drop out of the tree and fly west.  I looked for him every day after that, and never saw him again, but I still hope he returns with a mate to nest--Dad always has reports of the goose nests, but a nesting eagle in our backyard trumps any waterfowl.