Bald Eagles of Portland and Neskowin

There are two places I photograph bald eagles. One is a floodplain refuge inside the city of Portland, ten minutes from my house. The other is a beach on the Oregon coast where I have been going for a good part of my life. The birds are the same species. The lives they lead are not remotely the same — and the fact that I can photograph either of them is the result of a decision made in 1972.

Start with that, because everything else in this post rests on it. By the early 1960s the bald eagle was very nearly finished in the lower 48 states. DDT had worked its way up the food chain into fish and from fish into eagles, where it interfered with the calcium that goes into an eggshell. The shells came out too thin. Females crushed their own eggs simply by sitting on them, and a generation of birds quietly failed to arrive. At the low point, somewhere around 417 nesting pairs were left in the entire contiguous United States — the national bird, down to a number you could fit in a small theater.

DDT was banned in 1972. The Endangered Species Act followed in 1973. And then the most remarkable thing happened, which is that nothing dramatic happened at all: people simply left them alone, and the eagles did the rest. They were delisted in 2007. There are now tens of thousands of them. Every photograph below exists because of that.

🦅 There’s a quiz at the end — twelve questions on what’s below. Jump to the quiz →

Part One: The City Eagles — Oaks Bottom

Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge is a strip of floodplain, meadow and marsh along the Willamette in southeast Portland — the city’s first urban wildlife refuge, with a heron rookery, a paved bike path, and traffic noise drifting down off the bluff. It is not wilderness. There are bald eagles in it anyway.

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This is what an adult looks like: white head, white tail, that enormous yellow bill, and a brown body with the feathers laid over one another like roof shingles. He did not always look like this. A bald eagle takes about five years to earn the white head — until then it wears mottled brown and cream and gets misidentified as a golden eagle by nearly everybody, including me, more than once.

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Here is one of those young birds, also at Oaks Bottom — mottled brown and cream from throat to tail, no white head anywhere, and a bill that has only just started to turn from slate toward yellow. That bill is the clue to its age: dark in a first-year bird, chrome yellow in a full adult. This one is a couple of years into the transition.

And there is a genuine trap here beyond the color. Young bald eagles have longer flight and tail feathers than adults do, so their wings look broader and their tails look longer. A juvenile can appear bigger than a mature eagle perched next to it while actually being the same size or smaller. Dark plumage, no white head, and an outline that reads large — you can see why the golden eagle reports keep coming in.

These are also the wanderers. Adults hold a territory and stay; young eagles range for years before they settle, following food and open water across hundreds of miles, and then generally come back to breed near where they hatched. For a Portland eagle, that means somewhere along this river.

The name is older than the confusion. “Bald” here has nothing to do with hairlessness; it comes from an old word meaning white-headed, the same root that survives in a piebald horse. He is not bald. He is marked.

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Same bird, one second later, looking straight down the lens. I have been doing this a long time and it still rearranges something in your chest when it happens.

He is genuinely seeing more than I am. An eagle’s eye resolves detail several times finer than ours, and it does it with two foveae per eye instead of our one — a sharp spot aimed forward and a second aimed out to the side, so the bird can track something ahead and something below at the same time. That is the equipment that lets it pick a fish out of moving water from a few hundred feet up. When an eagle looks at you, it is reading detail you will never have access to.

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Here is a thing worth knowing about that famous glare: it is not an expression. The heavy bony shelf above the eye — the supraorbital ridge — reads to us as a permanent scowl, but it is a sunshade. A fixed visor, keeping glare off the eye of an animal that spends its life staring down at bright water. Eagles look fierce because of how they are built to see. The face you are reading as contempt is a piece of optical hardware.

The neck does the rest. Birds carry roughly twice as many vertebrae in the neck as we do, which is why he can swivel his head almost straight backward while the rest of him stays put on the branch.

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The whole bird, last light, gold on the lichen. What you cannot see here is the wingspan, folded away out of sight: six to seven and a half feet, wider than most people are tall. And if you ever see two eagles together and one is noticeably bigger, that one is the female. In eagles the female is the larger bird by around a quarter — the reverse of what most people expect, and the rule across birds of prey.

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And this is the moment it all opens up. Wings full out to kill speed, tail fanned as an airbrake, feet swung forward and down with the talons already spread for the branch. Those talons are close to two inches of curved bone and keratin, and the grip behind them is on the order of ten times what a human hand can manage — enough that the bird can hold a struggling fish while flying. Everything in this frame is happening in about a second and a half.

It is worth sitting with where this is. Oaks Bottom is inside a city of well over half a million people. There is a bike path underneath this bird. A pair has nested on Ross Island just upriver for years, and eagles work the whole stretch of the Willamette through town — over the industrial reach, over the bridges, over kayakers. Sixty years ago this bird had all but vanished from the country. Now it is a commuter.

Part Two: The Coast Eagles — Neskowin

Neskowin is a small town on the north Oregon coast with a beach, a creek, and Proposal Rock standing offshore in the surf. I have been going there most of my life. The eagles there live an entirely different life from the Portland birds — no bike path, no bridges, just wind coming off the Pacific and a beach that delivers something edible every tide.

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He came down the south beach fast and low with the breakers going off behind him. Look at the wingtips: those long primary feathers spread apart into separate fingers. That slotting does the same job as the upturned winglets you see on an airliner — it breaks up the vortex that spills off the end of a wing and recovers lift that would otherwise be thrown away as turbulence. Aeronautical engineers got there eventually. The eagles were already using it.

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Feet drawn up tight, tail fanned, near wing at the top of the stroke. A bird trimmed for speed, running the beach the way a surfer reads a wave — and largely for free, because the wind coming onshore does most of the work. This is the frame I had been trying to get at Neskowin for years.

What they eat here is mostly fish, and what they do to get it is not always noble. Bald eagles are enthusiastic thieves. They will harass an osprey in midair until it drops its catch, then take the fish before it hits the water. This bothered Benjamin Franklin, who wrote in a private letter in 1784 that the eagle was “a Bird of bad moral Character” who “does not get his Living honestly,” and said some kind things about the turkey in the same breath. He never actually campaigned to make the turkey the national bird — that part is folklore — but his complaint about the eagle was accurate and stands to this day.

The Fish Tax

I have watched bald eagles take fish from ospreys in midair over the Willamette, and once you have seen it a few times you start to form opinions.

Consider how the two birds actually earn a living. An osprey hovers over the water for a long time, picks its moment, and then goes in head first from height — hits hard, goes under, and has to fight its way back into the air carrying a wet fish that does not want to go. It is genuinely difficult work, and they miss plenty. Then, as the osprey climbs away with its catch, an eagle who has been sitting on a branch watching the whole performance comes out to meet it, harasses it until it lets go, and takes the fish out of the air on the way down.

I call it the fish tax. The osprey does the hovering, the diving and the hauling; the national symbol takes a cut on the way home. I have offered this theory to a number of people out at Oaks Bottom and it usually gets a laugh — with one memorable exception, a fellow who turned out to work for the IRS.

I should be honest about the order these things happened in. I had been telling the fish tax story for a while before I had any idea that Benjamin Franklin got there first — that in 1784 he had written almost the same complaint in a letter, that the eagle “does not get his Living honestly” because it robs the fishing hawk. Nobody told me. I just stood on the bank watching it happen and drew the obvious conclusion, and then found out later that a Founding Father had watched the same behavior and been just as unimpressed.

There is something reassuring in that. Two people, two and a half centuries apart, no communication between them, both looking at an eagle taking a fish it did not catch and thinking the same thing.

Biologists have a politer word for it: kleptoparasitism, stealing food another animal has already caught. It is not laziness, exactly. It is arithmetic. Why spend the calories on a dive you might miss when you can spend far fewer bullying a smaller bird that already succeeded?

And the ospreys do not simply accept it. That photograph is the reply — an osprey buzzing an eagle at close range while the eagle sits on its branch and hollers about it. Ospreys will fly repeated passes at a perched eagle, close enough to make the point, which is the same tactic crows use on hawks. You cannot win a fight with a bird twice your weight, but you can make its afternoon considerably less restful.

One Last Thing: They Don’t Sound Like That

You know the eagle scream. The piercing cry that plays over every flag, every truck commercial, every slow-motion shot of a mountain range.

That is a red-tailed hawk.

A bald eagle actually sounds like a squeaky screen door — a thin, chittering series of whistles that comes out of a seven-foot bird and lands somewhere between a gull and a kettle. Hollywood decided a long time ago that this would not do, and started dubbing in the hawk. So the national symbol has been going around in someone else’s voice for about seventy years, and almost nobody knows. Once you have heard the real thing you cannot unhear it, and I promise it will improve your next patriotic montage.

Why It Matters

Sixty years ago there were 417 nesting pairs left. Somebody noticed, somebody made an argument, a chemical got banned and a law got written, and people mostly stopped shooting them. That is the entire intervention. No heroics, no technology — a decision, and then patience.

I think about that every time one of these birds sits still long enough for me to work. We are perfectly capable of driving something to the edge, and we are perfectly capable of choosing not to. Both of those are on the record now, in the same species, within one human lifetime. Mine, in fact.

Go stand on the bluff at Oaks Bottom on a cold clear morning and look at the tall cottonwoods, or walk the south beach at Neskowin with the wind in your face. They are there. That is not an accident, and it did not have to turn out this way. 🦅

Quiz: Do You Know Your Bald Eagles?

Twelve questions, and every answer is somewhere above. No pressure — the eagle is judging you regardless, but only because of the brow.