The Brackendale Eagles

You can live in a city for over 10 years, and still learn something new all the time. for some inexplicable reason, the majestic eagles of brackendale of eluded me for this entire time. until now.

I first heard of it from my friend mike, who said we should go visit backendale, an area right outside of squamish. there, you can stand on a dyke and watch these guys watch you for hour on end as they sit in their little provincial park. no, seriously, those little bastards just sit there all smug in trees way too far away all day long, and occasionally fly down to the water, to eat a fish which is floating by. and then they just sit on the fish for hours, slowly eating away. occasionally they excuse some feistiness and play fight, but its a lot of sitting around and watching. the fish I’m speaking of is the mid december coho run. as they swim upriver to spawn, they are dying and the eagles congregate in this area to take full advantage.

Now, being the serious birders mike and myself are (we aren’t), we (mike) decided too borrow (mike kindly asked) mike’s bosses super telephoto birding lens. Now, by super telephoto birding lens, i mean nikon’s AF-S NIKKOR 400mm f/2.8G ED VR. Holy moly, is that ever a beauty of a lens. twinned with a 2x teleconverter, we were both drooling at the prospect of an equivalent 1200mm!!!!! of reach on our first ever eagle shoot! you may ask, what does this mean? it means you are going to see the reflection of yourself in the eyeball of those damn eagles! that eagle is going to fill that camera frame so much that all we will get is eye and beak pictures! the prospect excited us immensely, and even more so when we actually pulled the lens out and had a look at all 10 pounds of it.

Here is mike pulling the lens out of the bag.

and here is a picture of me later in the day using the lens too

Now, before we get too carried away, lets get back to brackendale. So, we head out of vancouver at 6:30am, and get to squamish around 8. Its a super crisp morning, hovering just around freezing, with a layer of clouds overhead. we got the lay of the land from some of mike’s friends who have been to see the eagles before. So, we head out to some bridges, and pull over. in each case, we see eagles sitting in trees all around us, but whenever we try to take a picture of them, they are just way too far away! now, you might ask, andrew, how can that be? you have 1200mm of lens! you should be chest deep in eagle. well dammit. we just couldn’t get close enough. we tried creeping up on them. we tried to get closer by walking along banks. no dice all around. every time, all we saw was them sitting in trees off in the distance, or flying away from us, as you can see below.

we saw lots of those pesky eagles flying away from us…..

and taunting us in trees too far away.

it took us much of the morning to even get any good shots around those bridges and along the river where we tried, but i managed to get a few.

this cute little young eagle

some flying overhead

more in the damn trees

I even just got one of this eagle chasing and playing with a seagull. and i would consider this one even borderline.

pretty much just luck and chance made it so i got any useable pictures up until this point. manage to snap lots with little eagles, and some nice scenery at least.

i like this one with the morning mist

and check out those guys hiding on the tree behind, who i only saw after processing this picture.

I mean, at least it was beautiful out, if cold and miserable

at this point we put the super telephoto thru its paces. this picture was of a distant peak, straight out of camera. so crisp!

so at this point, we are cursing birders, the birds, and everything else. You might say these are great photos, but its really not what we wanted. we wanted to get closer to them. So we go back to a spot we saw early in the morning, the dyke along the river thats the tourist spot. this is what it looks like

the bird sanctuary on the other side of the river

but guess what! you might not be able to see it, but our elusive cohorts have come down from the trees, and are eating fish on the bank! theres a little spec on that beach. ohh my, were we excited! finally! all of a sudden our luck turned to all out eagle in range! mike and i took turns taking photos as the birds ate and generally sat around on the beach.

finally, look at them!

and this guy! he’s so mad!

they can be quite regal though, even sitting on a beach on a fish.

for the next several hours, we just stayed in one spot, and shot away. I started with 860 pictures. 350 were for sure blurry. that took me to about 500. from that, i pared it down to 80 down to these final 45 or something! onwards.

I liked this guy on the log

Now the juveniles are quite interesting. they don’t get their white heads and black feathers till they are a few years old.

I was wondering why they looked that way. i figured it out when i took this picture. theres an eagle in there flying. i don’t know who they are trying to hide from, but they are well masked.

every once in a while one would fly by

us monkeying around

then, we saw a group of 4 of them congregate on the closest sandbar to us. we hastily made our way over, and proceeded to get some of the best pictures of the day

i liked this guy on the log in the water

fighting over fish

taking off

yum, lunch

we know your watching us puny human

tasty coho

and then, i got a bunch more of them flying around.

Phew. what a day. i was exhausted that evening, from standing around outside in the cold all day. and all the excitement. big thanks go to mike for introducing me to the notion of this even existing in bc, his boss for the incredible gift of getting to use a lens so far out of my reach its not even funny, and the eagles for being awesome in the end. at one point we were pretty fed up and never wanted to hear the word birding ever again. but a lot of photography is just being in the right place at the right time, and if you give up, that can never happen. so we stuck with it, and even though I’m happy with the results, i still have a LOT to learn. (and would it kill BC for a little sun to come out while we were there? jeez)

personally i would love to go back, and give it another crack.

and finally, I will end with what i usually stick too.