There are times when I feel sorry for people who don't live here. They don't know what they are missing. For one thing, we don't have to go out hunting for natural wonders. They usually come to us, even in the suburb of Warren where I live. My aunt has been around the world a couple times. She summed up her experiences by saying there are always three different prices people pay for stuff: the tourist price, the price residents pay, and the price natives pay. When it comes to Mother Nature, people around here are rich without knowing it.
This is the Allegheny High Plateau and it is much different than anywhere else you have been. This is the only place I have lived where the sun shines even when it's raining. It happened again yesterday.
I step outside on my front porch today for just a minute and a bald eagle flies 40 feet over my head. At first I thought it had to be a vulture (eagles are in the vulture family after all). Eagles don't usually fly so close to buildings and this one was low, not a usual sighting.
If you've been around here long enough it's pretty easy to identify an eagle in the distance by the low rate at which they flap their wings. If this bird were a vulture it sure had a beautiful way of flying for a vulture. The wings undulated. That's why I kept watching it.
Then the darn thing just kept getting closer and sure enough, its head and neck were covered by white feathers and brown ones, a juvenile bald eagle I suppose. Young eagles have entirely brown head and neck feathers and are sometimes confused with golden eagles which are entirely brown throughout their lives.
Golden Eagles are rarely sighted around here, but if you dig through your copy of Petersen's Guide (a fellow who lived here on the Allegheny River watershed) you will notice that they migrate through here. I never understood bird watchers but apparently they can be quite passionate and go on elaborate trips to find things that by their very nature do not stay in one place too long. Seems like trying to find a moving needle in a haystack.
Around here you don't have to search. Things come to you. At my Ma's I was picking up some debris in front of her white garage doors on a sunny day in late August when an ominous shadow ran across the entire door. This is something that activates the sympathetic nervous system, dumps adrenaline into your bloodstream, and clears up your sinuses in about two heartbeats.
The sympathetic nervous system prepares you to do one of three things: fight, flight, or freeze. In my autonomic system's innate wisdom I chose the latter. This allowed my heart rate to get back to normal, but my sinuses still remained clear. Ahead of the game, conscious thought took over so I turned my head to look in the distance to see what was going on in the sky. Nothing there.
Weird, weird, weird. Paging Dr. Stephen King, paging Dr. King. As my gaze returned back to earth my eyes found the basketball goal in the driveway, just a few feet away. I've been to a few zoos but the biggest bird I've ever seen was sitting on top of the backboard peering at mom's back yard and then it stared at me for about 60 seconds, its wings folded.
A few thoughts ran through my head for a minute. It was obviously an eagle by its regal posture, its piercing eyes, its tremendous weapon of a beak.
Did I look like lunch? Were its talons as big as my hand? I was afraid to take my eyes off its eyes to find out. But its head and neck feathers were entirely brown. This brought a flashback to age 5 when I discovered a possum in the chicken coop and ran back into the house proclaiming there was a giant mouse in the backyard.
I later checked with the neighborhood bird expert who told me it had to be an immature bald eagle. No one had seen a golden eagle around here in ages, much less sitting on your mother's basketball goal five feet away from you. I agreed with her. I don't know anything about birds.
But, looking back, I think it was too big to be an immature bald eagle. It was at least twice the size of the bald eagle I saw today from my front porch. How big was it? I'm talking Lord-of-the-Rings big, folks. When it finally gave me back my freedom, it left by leaping off its perch and flapping its wings just once. I'm not kidding. With one effort it was over the next ridge past the creek two miles away in less than half a minute.
I can't visit my mother's without seeing that basketball goal and remembering the bird. It's quite a basketball goal, constructed by a local steel fabricator, another neighbor. I am sure it will be there long after my mother's house is gone.
And birds like that one will be around long after we are all gone too, whether we see them or not.
---Chris Lareau
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