Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Unlike the poignantly moving and, at the time, controversial film by the same name as my post title which came out when I was a toddler (1967), our dinner guest, or should I say breakfast guest, is of a feathered nature.

When I stepped out onto our patio today to take the dogs out, I heard the familiar cries of one of our resident eagles.  Each morning and night they fly back and forth from their perches on the river, to their nest somewhere way up the creek from us.  I'm used to hearing them call to one another and yell at the osprey who constantly badger them, but this time the calls seemed much closer than usual.

With my camera never far away, I went back inside and put my long lens on in hopes that I might catch a glimpse of him or her in a nearby tree.  As I was scanning the trees, looking among the leaves, I happened to glance to my left towards the field and this is what I saw.

There were also two vultures, and along with the eagle, they appeared to be having a dinner party of sorts on something that must have been killed by the tractor that mowed the fields next to us yesterday.

I snapped a few shots of the eagle in the field, and then quietly tried to get a little closer, to no avail.  Before I could even get down the steps of the patio, the eagle was off and running.  I was still hundreds of feet away, but the eagle was having no part of it all, so I backed off and went back on the patio still snapping as he flew off.

In the photo above you can see him or her with a tiny bit of field grass still hanging from his mouth.  This may have actually been a female since they are the larger of the two sexes in the eagle world.

As much as I love capturing their sheer power and beauty, I don't like disrupting their daily routines.  So I kept my distance, which meant most of the rest of my photos were of eagle butts.  I have to say though, that even from a rear view, they are pretty amazing creatures!