{"id":20581,"date":"2024-03-06T00:34:59","date_gmt":"2024-03-06T07:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=20581"},"modified":"2024-03-04T14:36:58","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T21:36:58","slug":"baldies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/06\/baldies\/","title":{"rendered":"Baldies"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES<\/em><\/p>\n

Bald eagle.
\nIt\u2019s one of those birds so iconic the mere mention of its name brings a certain reverie.
\nYou\u2019ve heard other names in these pages, most recently ferruginous hawk, hooded merganser, Northern saw-whet owl. Exotic names, beautiful birds, each a unique feathered beast uncommonly seen. I am willing to bet that if we were walking together and I pointed and said one of those three names, you would look over, squint to see what I was looking at, and maybe ask one or two questions, one of which would be, \u201cIs that unusual?\u201d
\nNow, if I just leaned a little forward in the car and looked toward the sky and said, \u201cbald eagle,\u201d I bet you\u2019d stop what you\u2019re doing, crane your head and neck, and then hit me with a slew of questions that would start with \u201cWhere?\u201d, proceed to \u201cAre you sure?\u201d, and then continue with working to show the rest of the people in the car the bird\u2014\u201cThere, there! Do you see it!?\u201d
\nYou would also make some sort of comment about America, patriotism, and the grandeur of Nature. That\u2019s Nature with the capital N.
\nOf course, the \u2018you\u2019 in the above scenarios is any one of my family members. Perhaps, though, it might be you\u2026 you.
\nThere is something about bald eagles that draws us in. Maybe it is as simple as the fact that they are our national symbol (which, in case it was not obvious, is a bird; how cool is that?).
\nA brief tangent. In cases like this, where I start thinking about choosing a symbol to represent a country (tangent within a tangent\u2014Ben Franklin wanted the national bird to be the turkey, in so many ways a better choice, except when the Founding Fathers pretended they were at a sporting event and started yelling, \u201cGo Eagles!\u201d and \u201cGo Turkeys!\u201d \u2026 you know the path history chose), I invariably think, \u201cWhat bird would represent me?\u201d
\nMy penchant for grouse, flickers, and chickadees leaves me wondering. I do think it would be cool to embody the sage grouse as a family and once a year all gather in some strange place to dance.
\nBack to bald eagles.
\nThey were a good choice because they are so impressive. First, they\u2019re huge\u2014at almost 3 feet long with nearly a 7-foot wingspan, and coming in at 10 pounds, they\u2019re like a flying, feathered tiger. Then add the obvious, the heads and tails of the adults are white, making the answer to \u201cAre you sure?\u201d obvious even to a total novice.
\nYeah, I\u2019m sure.
\nAnd the particular beauty of baldies around here? They are just rare enough. The ones you see driving up north. The one that cruises the river corridor by the Bow Bridge. The one that perches along Buttercup Road in the cottonwoods. Some of these might be the same bird. It might be two. It might be more. Regardless, we see them just intermittently enough not to know and to still be wowed.
\nThe one my students and I saw flying out of Alturas Lake when we were there at the end of February for our Winter Ecology Field Study? That one cutting across the deep green pines, cutting through the falling flakes of snow? The one that came when I was asking, \u201cHow do you think animals adapt to winter up here?\u201d \u201cHow do you think that animal adapts?\u201d
\nThere was no need to answer, mostly because we all just stood there, silently, watching it fly by. Just what you should do.<\/p>\n

Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 52nd year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and one of their three baby adults\u2014Simon. The other members of the flock are Georgia and Penelope (Georgia recently fledged from Davidson College in North Carolina and Penelope is at Middlebury College in Vermont).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY HARRY WEEKES Bald eagle. It\u2019s one of those birds so iconic the mere mention of its name brings a certain reverie. You\u2019ve heard other names in these pages, most recently ferruginous hawk, hooded merganser, Northern saw-whet owl. Exotic names, beautiful birds, each a unique feathered beast uncommonly seen. I am willing to bet that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20582,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,34],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20581","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-commentary","8":"category-science-place"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20583,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20581\/revisions\/20583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}