With fresh snow on the ground and in the trees, as soon as I had the driveway cleared up in good shape, I took a short run around the neighborhood to see what I could see and photograph. There were very few places with plowed access, and I ended up at Roger’s Pond in Kennebunk. As I have mentioned before, Roger’s Pond is a summer fishing-, and winter skating-pond right on the banks of the Mousam River. It is a popular spot in summer, not only for pond-fishing, but for fly-fishing in the river. It is popular with me because of the dragonflies in the pond and along the river.

Last winter I was surprised to find a Bald Eagle, full adult, there one morning…and again yesterday there were two…hunting from the trees that overhand the river on the far side. Seeing them reminded me of conversations with dog walkers (with whom Roger’s Pond is also very popular) last year who claimed the Eagles are regular there.  I caught these two from the corner of my eye as they took off practically right across from me and flew down the river to perch several hundreds of yards further away. This is about the full reach of my Canon SX50HS…1200mm zoom plus 1.5x Digital tel-extenter for 1800mm equivalent. The image is cropped, not for scale, but for composition. It is not, technically, a good image. Viewed much larger than you see it here, it falls apart into paint-like blobs and blotches, but at this scale it captures, I thing, all the majesty we like to imagine the National Bird to be in possession of.

I went back later, twice actually, with my spotting scope and digiscoping rig, but both the good light of morning and the Eagles had gone on the first swing…and the second, when I did find one of the Eagles, was just at sunset when it was really too dark for long-range photography. Still…

I will, of course, go back this morning and see if I can catch them in scope in better light. We will see 🙂