Up on Lake Ontario this past August the whole campground was buzzing with the news. There was a Bald Eagle in the area! Several of the fishermen had spotted it, or claimed they had spotted it (you never can be too sure when it come to fishermen and their fish stories). My parents had even claimed to see it flying by on a number of occasions. They had spotted it from the porch. The first conversation actually went something like this:

“What’s new?”

“Your father and I saw a Bald Eagle today!”

“That is cool, where?”

“On the porch.”

“There was a Bald Eagle sitting on the porch!”

“No! It was over the lake, why would it want to sit on our porch?”

As the saying goes, ask a silly question. But regardless of exactly where my mother was positioned when she spotted it, she had seen a Bald Eagle and as a non-fishing individual her word could be trusted to the fullest.

Labor Day weekend came around and I had my camera at the ready, but Bald Eagle could not be seen. Sunday was actually a pretty miserable day, rain coming down in buckets most of the day, making visibility difficult, let alone flying. Not many birds of any kind had ventured out. Sometime after lunch, sitting on the edge of the porch with my feet up and starting to be lulled to sleep by the steady sound of rain on the roof, I noticed a large fluttering movement. Seemingly out of nowhere, an enormous bird settled down on the top of the telephone pole crossbar.

Quick confirmation with the long lens indicated it was one very wet and miserable looking Bald Eagle. It must have been pretty tired to decide to rest on that spot, totally exposed to the elements which were still on full blast. It moved around and adjusted, but the Eagle must have perched on that pole for about twenty minutes before it finally spread its wings and launched back into flight.

When I got home and examined the photos on my computer, two things became apparent. 1. This Eagle was really very wet. Poor thing. You almost looked like you could have wrung out its feathers. 2. Its coloring is a bit off. The head was white with some brown splotches. The beak was yellowish where it met the Eagle’s face. The underbelly of the bird also had a lot of white feathers showing. So what was wrong with the Bald Eagle?

The answer is nothing. Bald Eagles take several molts, effectively several years, before they acquire their adult appearance that we recognize so clearly. After they develop from the juvenile stage, Bald Eagles have a “subadult” phase. In both the juvenile and subadult stages Bald Eagles can be mistaken for their brown cousins, Golden Eagles.

As you can see from the pictures of my very damp friend, I think it was only a molt or maybe two away from the full adult plumage, with only some spotting of white on its wings and only white feathers starting to become apparent on its head.

The first Bald Eagle I saw in the wild was actually in Washington D.C. It was my husband’s first visit to the nation’s capital and we had decided to visit in January, when the Mall is both empty and cold. At the Jefferson Memorial my husband looked up and said, “Look, a Bald Eagle!” We had been joking all day about seeing the Vice President in a car window or Uncle Sam in a doorway, so I figured this was just another good natured joke about America and her patriotic symbols. But it was in fact a Bald Eagle. We didn’t have as long a lens as we have these days, so the photos do little more than prove him right. The white head and brown back is clearly visible against the clear blue sky.

I was recently discussing with a friend the increasing number of Bald Eagle sightings we are aware of in the past few years. We are both in our thirties, and I genuinely feel that there are more Bald Eagles around than there were when we were growing up. According to The Birds of New Jersey: Status and Distribution by William J. Boyle Jr. (2011), our instincts are correct, there is a growing number of Bald Eagles, in New Jersey. DDT, persecution and habitat destruction all combine to decrease the Bald Eagle population to the Endangered level in forty-eight states. In 1970 there was only one nest in all of New Jersey. Thanks to incubation programs through the Endangered and Nongame Species Project, in 2009 New Jersey sported 69 nests and 85 territorial pairs. Many more Bald Eagles who do not choose to nest in the Garden State year-round come to the area to winter. I certainly know that the northern New Jersey suburbs have a few hanging around. We have seen the odd Bald Eagle flying over the highway, always without a camera or a safe place to stop, naturally.

Those of us who live in Northern New Jersey are doubly lucky because a lot of Bald Eagles make their homes, or at least their winter residences, along the lower Hudson River. The ice breakers make it easier for the Eagles to access fresh fish throughout the winter and they are fairly common. We saw a nest at Stony Point Battlefield State Historic Site. We were taking a look at the lighthouse and the view of the river when we saw a huge flash of bird. “If I didn’t know better, I would have said that looked like a Bald Eagle!” I exclaimed to our guide. “Yup, it was. We have a nest.” She pointed to the nest and then headed back to the visit center, like people see Bald Eagles in the wild every day! Well, I guess she does probably see them every day. We decided to get the long lens out, sit on a bench and see if it circled around again. We didn’t get to see the adult again, but we did see a juvenile less than gracefully swooping around at the edge of the cliff.

You many not think so, but you will definitely know a Bald Eagle nest when you see it. At this point I have seen a few in real life, and I am still always surprised by just how big they actually are. They are the largest nests you will ever see in North America. The largest has been recorded at about 13 feet deep and 8.2 feet wide. They often add to the nest each year, reinforcing it, which is probably how they come to grow so large. This DIY project is part of the pair’s annual breeding ritual and helps them to both prepare for the coming eggs. There is a mating pair of Bald Eagles who reside on the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The nest has been in place for so long that they have had multiple generations of the same Bald Eagle family nest there.