One of our favorite New Year traditions is finding a weekend in January to find the bald eagles. We head down to Sanpete County and drive the backroads from Fountain Green up through Wales and into Chester. We've always been able to spot at least a few eagles on this trip every year, and this year we were successful again.
With Dad both playing basketball and coaching Mark's team, we were lucky to find a free Saturday. We started out pretty early and spotted our first eagle right in Lehi at Mill Pond where they like to hang out. Then we drove down to Sanpete County, and just outside of Fountain Green, we started to see more eagles. Many of the eagles that we saw on this trip were clustered together. We even saw one group of five sitting together on a hill. By the time we looped around to Chester we'd seen a few deer, some cool hawks, and around twenty bald eagles. Some of them were pretty close, too. Anyway, with Mom's awesome camera, the pictures turned out great! Here are some of our favorites.
We spotted a few deer just outside of Fountain Green.
There were a lot of hawks and other raptors, too.
We watched the telephone poles closely. You can actually drive right under the birds.
Even with the good camera, they are difficult to shoot in flight.
There are a few eagles in this photo.
Many were sitting close together on the ground. Second from right is a juvenile.
Some eagles are more beautiful than others.
One great thing about bald eagles is they are easy to identify!
The boys scan the fenceposts of every field.
This eagle was posed nicely for us in Nephi (Salt Creek) Canyon.
We really enjoyed hearing his call.
We were having such fun we decided to loop around over through Pigeon Hollow near Spring City where we used to see the eagles years ago with Grandma Ockey. This turned out to be a bust, though because we didn't see a single eagle over there. At least we ended up where we wanted to, in Ephraim at Fat Jack's Pizza. We'll take any excuse to end up there!
Gosh! They are so majestic!
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