Amazing photos and insight into immature eagles
By Dan Jordan, wildlife photographer
Have you heard? Bird is the word! Of course, this is a reference to the lyrics of a song from 1963 called Surfin’ Bird, by the Trashmen. Peter Griffin from Family Guy (Season 7) probably made the lyric more famous than the original with his quirky repetitive rendition of the “Bird, Bird, Bird, Bird is the Word” lyric. Anyways, in this series of articles, Bird [really is] the Word!
I have become a wildlife photographer in my retirement years. I travel extensively to find wildlife, but most of my encounters and the resulting images are from right here in our local area.
In the Sixth installment of this series, published last week, I shared images and stories of encounters with ruffed grouses. The subject of this article is the bald eagle, arguably my favorite bird species. Since many people misidentify young bald eagles as either hawks or golden eagles, I thought I would show the life cycle of young eagles as they approach adulthood to help clarify.
For this article, I am using images captured of eagles from one of our local nests. I live in Allegany, NY and am fortunate to have three bald eagle nests within a couple of mile radius of home. This affords me the opportunity for lots of eagle sightings and the ability to chronicle their lives.
The below image shows a young eagle, probably in its third year. Image from 2023 along the Allegheny River.
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Nearly everyone recognizes an adult bald eagle by its white head feathers. They’re not bald at all, they just have white feathers on their heads, which contrast the dark brown feathers of their bodies and wings. But most people don’t realize that these white feathers (tails are white too) don’t develop until their fifth year of life. After the light grey down is replaced by feathers of the eaglets, their plumage becomes mottled brown. Light colored feathers pair with dark brown to give the eagles a patchwork look. As they age, their head and tail feathers gradually become lighter before turning white as they reach adulthood.
This next image is of two very young eaglets on one of my local nests. My powerful lens allowed me to capture this image from a safe (and legal) distance from the nest.
Eaglets have disproportionately large beaks and feet. They ‘grow into’ these body parts as they rapidly gain size and coordination. If you’ve ever watched a nest-cam live stream, you’ve undoubtedly seen very young eagles stumbling around and falling down a lot as they learn to use those feet and balance those enormous beaks which at first give them an unwieldy, high center of gravity.
Young eagles have voracious appetites and grow very quickly. When they fledge, take first flight, they have long been full grown. The nests get quite crowded as the eagles grow. When an adult (or both) comes to the nest at feeding time, it becomes standing room only!
Bald eagles usually lay two eggs, but one or three would not be rare. The nest featured in this article has produced three fledglings for two years in a row, which is not a normal occurrence. The previous image shows the three fledglings in 2023 a month or so after they left the nest.
Here’s another image of a young eagle from the featured family unit, also from 2023.
Allow me to take a bit of a tangent here. When I posted this image, I had several people congratulate me on photographing a golden eagle, a common mistake that people make. First, there are no native golden eagles in NY or PA, that is no nesting pairs. We do rarely see goldens in our area but they are itinerant and/or migratory. In my years of photographing bald eagles (I have well over 600,000 images of bald eagles), I have photographed exactly one golden in our area. Goldens are more common west of the Mississippi River.
Second, there are many identifying features of golden eagles missing in this image. A couple that are easy to look for are:
-Feathers completely covering ankles, right down to their feet.
-Smaller beaks and heads than bald eagles.
-No mottled feathers in their shoulder pit areas.
The above image is clearly that of an immature bald eagle.
The below image is of a first-year eagle captured in 2021 as it perched atop a sand pile at a local concrete factory.
Here’s another image of an immature bald eagle from this nest. You can see why some would confuse this with a (very large) red-tailed hawk, at least from a distance.
I could prattle on forever about bald eagles but let me close this article with a bit of information about sub-adult bald eagles. Sub-adulthood roughly is equivalent to teenage years for humans. This is the last phase of their development before they select a mate (for life). Their head and tail feathers lose most of the brown color, although their tails keep the brown rims. This is their fourth year of life. Sub-adults are my favorites to photograph, because their plumage has so much ‘character’. Adult bald eagles all look the same, whereas subadults can easily be identified by their unique looks. Here is an image from the local area, but I cannot attest whether this eagle came from the local nest, probably not.
That image was captured in 2023, the following year, that eagle would have reached full adulthood and taken a mate.
Young eagles leave the nesting area, often chased off by their parents, and become itinerant. That said, I’ve read that they often come back to the areas where they fledged when they become adults and look to build nests and families. I am sure that this has been determined by tracking eagles which have been tagged as young eaglets. One of the adult eagles from this nest wears an ankle bracelet (a DEC tag).
So, there you have it, a brief introduction to the early years of bald eagles. A future edition of ‘Bird is the Word’ will feature more eagle images of adult, bald eagles , our national bird. I may even devote an edition to subadult eagles, since I have so many images and anecdotes about them.
I plan to submit more in this series of anecdotes about my local wildlife encounters in the future. If you have any questions or comments for me, or even suggestions, I can be reached at dan@jordanphotog.com. Thank you for your interest in my work.
Read more from Dan regarding immature “baldies” below:
