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bald eagles and jetskis



On Saturday afternoon I took a little spin in the kayak on Jordan Lake. It
usually takes a death wish to paddle the main lake on Saturday, but now in
October it's not quite as bad as in the summer. I earned myself some good
karma by saying hello nicely to a jetskier at the Farrington launch site. It
paid off. I was barely sitting down in my boat when a couple of immature
Bald Eagles flapped into sight. One went up the Bush Creek arm of the lake,
and the other flew over my head and across Farrington Road. The Jordan Lake
eagles are shy of humans but seem unfazed by boat noise. 
	I stayed parallel to the Farrington Road causeway and then went
south down the lake shore trying to keep out of the way of fast fishing
boats in the main channel. At about one-third of the way down to the Hwy. 64
bridge I reached an area of standing dead timber, left in the lake to
attract fish. One thick dead tree held an Osprey's nest about 8 feet above
the water -- I paddled right up to the tree to have a look. On the rim of
the nest I suddenly saw the skeletal mouthparts of a very large fish and
what looked like some mummified fish skin too. Catfish? It must have made a
huge dinner for the babies. Then I paddled on to other thinner trees that
held as many as three smaller nests each. These looked like miniature osprey
nests -- say one-quarter the size and also made of sticks. They were a
puzzle until I found one with the long black wing of a dead bird sticking
out of it, plus a neck hanging down that ended in a hooked beak -- a
cormorant. I had been seeing many formations of Double-crested Cormorants
flying south on the lake when I launched, and now I realized that I was in
their nesting and roosting area. At this late hour -- 5 p.m. -- I counted
ten trees about 50 yards to the south, each holding from several to many
perched cormorants, and there were also dozens of low snags with one bird
each. I estimated that 150 birds had settled there for the evening.
	I crossed to the west shore where someone was flying little
radio-controlled planes over the water -- two of them, beautifully painted,
with faint contrails from whatever they were burning for fuel. (This
reminded me of being out on the lake two or three years ago on the same day
that a couple of guys doing loops in a small airplane misestimated the
distance they needed to pull out of a dive and crashed into the water and
died -- though I didn't see it happen.) As I paddled north back toward the
boat ramps I spotted one of the osprey nesting platforms erected by CP&L a
couple of years ago. It had a big stick nest on top, and a chattering
kingfisher was perched on a crossbar. 
	I found a mixed flock of chickadees and titmice foraging up high in
sweetgums on the shore; below them, hopping around some bare willow branches
and flipping its tail, was a Palm Warbler. A real beauty, with lemon yellow
undertail coverts. Then an immature Bald Eagle flew low up the shore ahead
of me, and a Great Blue Heron hunkered down in a pine tree and pretended to
be invisible as I paddled by. The sun was getting very low when I crossed
the main channel again to reach the boat ramps. A jetskier was using the "No
wake" buoy as the center of a tight circle he roared around and around and
around. I just smiled and kept my cool because I had had such good luck.
Ginger_Travis@unc.edu
Chapel Hill, NC