On the way out to church this morning, we saw a bald eagle. Is that not just the best?

Greg and I regale each other with wildlife sightings from time to time. “Saw a pheasant on the road to the orchard.” “Saw a bunch of wild turkeys behind the grocery store.” “Saw a fox.” “Saw a heron.”

We know we can’t share this goofy excitement with locals. They’re used to seeing these things. So we tell each other, and keep count. Greg generally comes out ahead, so I’m very glad I was in the car when we saw the eagle.

What’s fun too was that we had just left town. There was some possum-esque roadkill ahead of us and we were seeing a rather large bird zeroing in on it. I forget which one of us was talking, but as we got closer we both forgot what we had been talking about.
“Is that –?”
“What is that?”
“It’s –”
And it was. At the same moment that we were registering that the wingspan was too big for a hawk and that it didn’t have the dangling legs of a heron, it banked away from the roadkill and we got a great look at the white head and tail.
“That’s a BALD EAGLE!”
“It is! It is a BALD EAGLE!”

All right, so we get a little excited. Still, … c’mon. That’s pretty darn cool. Greg wanted me to draw up a schematic that was something like this:

Well, that’s sort of it. Just for the exercise, I tried to sketch out more how it really looked. Because of course, in spite of being a really close look, it was still indistinct and on the move. So something like this:

And you know? It was beautiful. I mean really. I remembered that Benjamin Franklin had wanted to make our national bird the turkey. But I’m glad he was overruled. Because I’ve seen turkeys, and they’re kinda neat. But there’s nothing like a bald eagle.