Royal Bird of the Skies

Posted by chikah

Deep in the northern wilderness, in a mixed forest of pine and oak, where here and there the bleached spar of a dead spruce thrust its barren tip up into the summer sky, there stands an ancient oak tree that is taller by many yards than its neighbors. In a high crotch there is a great platform of sticks, some of them as long as an Indian's bow and as thick as a man's wrist, woven together as carefully and firmly as the twigs in the nest of a catbird. The top of the platform is a saucer-like hollow, and in its center is a thick, soft heap of dead grass. So wide and solid is this structure a deer might lie upon it in comfort. It is the aerie of Sky-King, the bald eagle, and his mate.

I almost said "my friend Sky-King," because that is I have come to regard him that May day when first I saw him, a regal, white-headed sentinel perched in his lookout. And there through the leafless branches of the oak, I could also see the white head of the brooding mother. Buckling on climbers and safety ropes, I started up. When my head came level with the edge of the platform, two broad shadows crossed and recrossed before me, and the screams of the eagles were constant.

That nest was a marvel of construction, woven painstakingly, and of material worthy of a king's home. Great dead branches of oak, spruce and pine, were laced and interlaced till the whole structure lay balanced among the branches as firm as a part of the tree itself.

Under the nest the ground was carpeted with a thick tangle of the dead sticks, dropped by the eagles while at work. I raised my head above the rim of the platform, and the secrets of Sky-King's home were revealed. Three white eggs, nearly round, and a little larger than a duck's egg, were bedded in the heap of soft dry grass in the center of the nest. But three weeks passed before I visited this home again.

There were weeks of warm spring days, during which I thought often of the mother eagle, motionless and alert at her tedious but happy task, and of Sky-King, perched on the spruce spar, keeping watchful guard. About them was the unbroken silence of the forest, with few creatures on the ground or in the air that they need fear.