My neighbor Crandall doesn’t stop by.

Why should he? He’s in Haines, Alaska with me.

Alaska is the perfect place for wayward travelers like us. I love the vastness and the nature. Crandall comes because Alaska has the second highest per capita consumer rate of SPAM, trailing only Hawaii, and is above average in consumption of TV dinners and mashed potatoes. He got all excited about seeing an anchor in the box of an Alaskan pickup. He thought it was cruise control. He got a tattoo of a banker on his arm. The tattoo artist was a little hard of hearing. Crandall had asked for an anchor. Cold weather encourages a man to dress like a dork—Crandall’s normal style. When he needs a pocket on a T-shirt, he uses duct tape to make one. He can sleep hanging on a nail. To Crandall, Alaska is like Disneyland.

“I love empty places,” I say to Crandall.

“Well, you should love your head then.”

“I love the everything of nothingness,” I go on.

“You get excited about the absorbency of a paper towel. I will admit that being in Alaska is more fun than a mosquito could have in a blood bank. I thought I’d better come to our biggest state before I get to the point where I take the pills on the bottom shelf of my medicine cabinet so that I’ll be able to reach the pills on the top shelf of my medicine cabinet.”

The American Bald Eagle Foundation

William Blake wrote, “When thou seest an eagle, then thou seest a portion of genius.”

I was working for the American Bald Eagle Foundation in Haines, Alaska in November. This eaglecentric place gave me the opportunity to gawk at bald eagles feeding along the Chilkat River. There, the eagles find chum salmon in numbers enough to keep their appetites sated. There is something about looking at our national bird that is impossible to articulate. Seeing them is an indefinable joy that makes it nearly impossible to stop looking at them. In a world filled with unappreciated wonders, seeing an eagle is an exciting discovery. I want to see just one more eagle in the same way my old coach wanted his players to run just one more lap.

Bald eagles build the largest nests of any bird in North America. They are typically constructed of large sticks gathered from the ground or broken from dead branches. They add materials each year. Nests can weigh more than a ton, stretch eight feet across, and stand 10 feet high.

Young eagles have longer feathers than do the adults. The wingspan of a young bald eagle can be up to 6 inches longer than that of a mature bird.

It’s a short drive from Haines to the 48,000-acre Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve that was established in 1982. There eagles are found in abundance.

I’ve seen the bald eagles in Haines before. I’ve seen so many of them in a tree that it looked like a candelabra. Thousands of eagles congregate along the Chilkat River, attracted by the late fall run of chum (dog) salmon. The eagles come to the Chilkat Valley from a wide area to the Bald Eagle Council Grounds where springs keep a 5-mile section of the Chilkat River from freezing for most of the winter. This gives the eagles easy pickings on a large supply of spawned-out chum salmon carcasses at a time of the year when food is scarce.

The eagles hitching a ride on the wind caused me a near sensory overload with so many of the beautiful, squawking birds.

The eagles are accustomed to traffic and humans (especially those bipeds equipped with cameras), and typically choose to ignore people. It makes sense for the eagles to perch motionless in the trees because it is a method of conserving energy during cold weather. They can usually find all the food they need within a couple of hours. Much of their effort is expended in stealing fish from one another and many of the eagles own master’s degrees in the art of pirating.

In 1984, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service recorded 3,988 eagles and November is the peak time. The eagle’s change in fate is a dramatic one, as from 1917 to 1952, 128,000 of Alaska’s bald eagles were killed for territorial bounties of $1 or $2 per bird. The talons were required to collect the bounty. Some have estimated that as few as one of seven eagles that were killed were turned in for a bounty.

Eagles are important to man’s stories. From mythology, the story is told of how Prometheus stole fire from heaven to relieve man’s suffering. Zeus, angered, had him chained to a rock and condemned Prometheus to the everlasting torment of having his liver continuously pecked by an eagle. This was not covered by Blue Cross.

Native Americans depicted the eagle in their petroglyphs as the thunderbird. The eagle is mentioned 30 times in the Bible. Aeschylus, the Greek poet, had the misfortune of having an eagle mistake his baldhead for a rock. The eagle dropped a tortoise on his head in the hopes of breaking its shell. Aeschylus died.

As the well-known rhyme goes, “Up and down the City Road/In and out the Eagle/That’s the way the money goes/Pop goes the weasel.” This is the tale of a patron of a London pub named The Eagle on City Road had to pawn (pop) his belongings to get back some money in order to feed himself.

Each time I see our national birds on display, I am reminded that not all birds were created eagle.

Trumpeter swans

Our largest waterfowl, the trumpeter swan is 5-feet long, has an 80-inch wingspan, and weighs around 23 pounds. The male is called a cob, the female a pen, and the young are cygnets. The swans have prodigious appetites and feed on plant roots, seeds, and foliage. They build nests consisting of piles of vegetation 6 feet in diameter on marshy shores of lakes and ponds, sometimes on muskrat houses. They lay five to nine eggs.

Thanks for stopping by

“Life is like riding a bike. It is impossible to maintain your balance while standing still.” — Linda Brakeall

“Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.” — Dave Barry

DO GOOD.

Al Batt of Hartland is a member of the Albert Lea Audubon Society. E-mail him at SnoEowl@aol.com.