May 08th, 2026

That's a big dang tree! The branches at the top kind of remind me of Medusa :)

Welcome to another Photo Safari Report!  I'm excited to jump into this one so I'll tell you the best part upfront.  I'm calling this post the Eagle Family Hike for what will very shortly be an obvious reason.

Very early in the hike, within probably 15 minutes  we saw this gorgeous creature.  An American Bald Eagle:

I have no idea if this gorgeous creature is the Mr or the Mrs and when I took this photos, I also had no idea that this was just one member of an entire family!  

Joy and I took a zillion or so photos, talking about how lucky we were to capture it and then we moved on. More walking, more talking, more photos.  And then, a mile or so later, Joy spied this:

I'll be honest. I wasn't absolutely certain what sort of giant bird I was looking at.  I knew from the beak and the stance that it was some sort of predator bird but as I was running through my mental catalogue of possibilities it wasn't matching anything I knew.  So I asked and learned that this was a juvenile eagle.  How exciting!  This was, basically, a teenager eagle. How beautiful is this guy or girl (I never can tell)

Not much farther long we came across:
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Oh Me, Oh My!  There were two of them!  Siblings, clearly.  This was way off the coolio scale. If I had ever seen a juvenile eagle before, I had no idea what I was seeing then. But I can absolutely swear to you that I'd never seen 2 of them at the same time! Wow!

Oh it gets even better!  How could it possibly get better, you ask?  Hang on to your bird-watching hats, friends:

In the same tree, THREE members of the same eagle family!  Dad (or mom) and two kiddos!  Holy Cats!  

We stood there happy snapping for a bit and then Joy suggested that we retrace our steps back to the first eagle sighting,  see if that one is still there. If so, oh my gosh, we might have seen the entire eagle family!  

As Joy is talking and I'm nodding along, we see the youngsters take wing and head in the direction we were already planning to go.  Off we went at the fastest hobble we could manage (both Joy and I have foot injuries that were ouching big time that day).  

Once we arrived back where we believed we began,  we were delighted to see that, yes, Mama or Daddy, was still in the same spot.  

We wondered what he (or she) was starring at so fixedly. It wasn't a prey stare......?  We followed the line of sight and found not only the nest but also, the youngsters back IN the nest! Wow!  And yes those nests are massive!

What an amazing start to a hike!

Eventually we moved on and saw other things that we deemed photo worthy.  Here are a few more birds. I will say that I missed easily a dozen shots of other birds. I was just moving too slow. Oh well.  Here it what I have:

We had a good soaking rain last Saturday so there were a few more botanicals then lately, but once the rains start showing  up regularly, it will be a regular flower show. Yay!

There were the friendliest bunnies!  While some careened away in wild directions in abject terror (coz we are, apparently terribly scary) others hopped right up to us!  Is someone feeding these bunnies and they thought we had goodies?  Oh and a surprisingly blase squirrel!

I believe I have a couple of randos still in the collection from yesterday.  Shall I add those in too?  Whyever not!  

I reckon that's it!   We've come to the end of the Eagle Family Hike which was awesome!  Hope you enjoyed this Photo Safari Report and I wish you all a wonderful weekend!