The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (31 page)

Late in the afternoon, as dusk crept up the eastern rim of the world, one of the bald eagles showed up with talons full of branches and dropped out of sight at the nest tree. Were they redecorating the nest on a cold winter day? The wind swelled and blustered. A solitary duck appeared, blown all over the place. White underside and black head and wings and was that a round white spot on its face?—probably a goldeneye, but for a second it resembled a penguin shot out of a cannon. Half an hour later two more eastbound ducks appeared, clocking along with the wind at about eighty miles per hour. The second bald eagle came into sight fighting the headwind, just hanging in the air and flapping vainly, until finally it turned and in seconds was miles away. The nest eagle rose up and followed.

The next morning the wind had calmed to thirty miles an hour with gusts hitting fifty. It was a cold and sunny day, and the bald eagle team was out flying at 8:00. As I made coffee I saw the big mystery bird flapping out of sight toward the neighboring ranch. Why was it so elusive? I wanted badly to get a good look at it, but it seemed to fly past only when my head was turned. The two isolated elk stood on a knoll at the west end of the cliff; antlerless, dark brown necks, yellow rumps, and red-brown body color. At first sight I could imagine they were the mountain sheep that used to live on the cliff in Indian times. Their faces seemed rather dished, like sheep faces. Magpies were busy across the river, and one raven sat in a tree slightly to the west of its nest site in the cliff. Could the raven, like the eagle, be interested in fixing up its nest so early in the year?

By afternoon the wind was up again, and at the top of the sky were three eagle-shaped specks. Three eagles playing in the wind. Three? Was one of them a juvenile bald planning to nest here, or was it the big mystery bird? And just how many eagles called this cliff home?

That night the wind went berserk, terrific shrieking and battering. In the morning it was still intense and I could see the windows moving slightly in and out. The worst wind yet. I went out into the driveway to see how badly it was drifted. Huge impassable drifts. The wind almost knocked me over. A small bird shot past the kitchen window, but on the far side of the river the two bald eagles sat calmly in the trees near their nest.

During the nights of high-velocity wind I lay tense and awake in the dark listening to the bellowing and roar. In the daytime it was easier to ignore. The television would not work because the wind had wrenched the satellite dish out of alignment. After four or five days of relentless howling the wind fell into a temporary coma, turning everything over to a warm, sunny, and calm day. Temperatures climbed into the forties. But the weather report warned that another storm was approaching. A friend in town smashed a narrow alley through the drifts on the county road and cleared out the driveway. I was no longer snowbound. The power company made it out and realigned the dish.

The daylight hours were lengthening by a few minutes each day. While it was calm I walked down to the east end of the property, and glancing up at the cliff I saw not one but two big dark birds. They were playing in the air, obviously delighted with the calm, with each other, with life in general. Then they both dove into their bedroom niche in the chimney west of the big, empty nest. I could not hear their voices, because a large flock of ducks, more than a hundred, flew over, twittering and whistling. The birds looked like eagles, they flew like eagles, but they were completely dark. They did not have the golden napes pictured in the bird books. Goldens soar with a slight dihedral; bald eagles soar with their wings almost flat. But I was now almost sure that a pair of golden eagles owned the big nest and were preparing to use it.

The next day started sunny but another three-day storm was on the way, and by late morning low, malignant clouds smothered the ranges in all directions. The weather people said it was going to turn very cold. I took advantage of the lull before the storm to get outdoors with the binoculars. A raven was fooling around the cliff face, trying out several niches. Then the big dark birds appeared above the cliff in a tumbling display. The binoculars showed that they did have lighter necks and heads. I had no doubt now. They were a pair of golden eagles and they were courting, planning to fix up the empty nest and raise a family only half a mile from the bald eagles. I felt fabulously wealthy with a bald eagle nest and a golden eagle nest both visible from my dining room window. I wanted to spend the day watching them, but the storm was due to hit during the night so I headed out to get supplies while the road was still open.

January wore on. It was cold, and day after day the snow fell as in Conrad Aiken's story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," which I read when I was eight years old, thinking it was a story about a profound snowfall. Later, when I learned it was an oblique study of intensifying juvenile madness, I was disappointed. On the frozen river four coyotes nosed around the north shore margins. Upstream the goldeneyes' strip of water was still open but shrinking daily.

On a Sunday morning of flat calm it was twenty-one degrees below zero. The air was stiff. Freezing mist had coated every tree and shrub. The river pinched in, making waists of black water in the ice. There were no birds in sight. The sun struggled up and the mist rose in great humps over the remaining ribbons of open water. The tops of the cottonwoods glittered like icy nosegays, stems wrapped in gauze. Spring seemed very far away, but the bald eagle pair sat side by side catching the first rays. They often sat this way, one great eagle-beast with two heads. As the sun gained height the eagles fluffed themselves out and began to preen. A lone magpie flew over the mist. In the afternoon I skied down to the east end and into the cottonwood bosque. A golden eagle and four magpies were eating the scanty remains of a snowshoe hare. The eagle fled as I came in sight, and the magpies followed reluctantly, sure I was after their feast. It was easy to see what had happened. The hare's tracks zigged and zagged through the brush, but one foot east of the corpse I saw the snow-angel wing prints of the attacking eagle.

 

Wyoming was once a haven for eagle killers. In the bad old days of the 1960s and 1970s in this valley many men who are now cattle ranchers raised sheep and firmly believed that bald and golden eagles carried off young lambs. If you raised sheep you killed eagles—bald or golden, but especially goldens, though both birds were protected by law—by poison (thallium sulfate was popular), or by shotgun from rented helicopters and small planes, or by rifle from an open pickup window. Eagles were killed in other states, especially in the West, but Wyoming became notorious to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to the Audubon Society, and to newspaper readers across the country as the home ground of the most ignorant and vicious eagle-killing ranchers. Chief among them was the wealthy and powerful sheep rancher Herman Werner, ex-president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. He and his son-in-law were called "the Wyoming helicopter monsters" after they used a hired helicopter to "sluice" eagles.

Nathaniel P. Reed, an assistant secretary of the interior under Richard Nixon, made stopping the killings a primary goal. In 1971 the FBI set up a sting. An agent who had been raised in the West posed as a ranch hand and got a job on Werner's spread, where, in the bunkhouse, he heard about dozens of dead eagles. Because this was hearsay, a federal judge would not issue a search warrant. But two Audubon Society members who had been monitoring the eagle killings were out at the airfield one day and happened to notice someone working on a nearby helicopter. They could see a shotgun and empty shells in the craft. They had a camera with them and they used it. The man working on the helicopter realized he had been photographed. Weeks later the anxiety-ridden helicopter pilot showed up at the Department of the Interior in Washington. He said that if he were granted immunity he'd tell about the eagle killings, and so he did, telling a Senate subcommittee that he had carried eagle-hunting shooters into the Wyoming skies, that Werner was one of the air service's best customers, and that the gunners had shot more than five hundred bald and golden eagles.
Time
reported that the Wyoming dead-eagle count was 770 birds. Despite "national outrage" the department was still not able to get a search warrant for Werner's land. But the U.S. Air Force flew a surveillance plane over the ranch, and an infrared camera picked up a pile of decomposing flesh. That finally got the search warrant and led to the discovery of a great number of eagle carcasses. As Dennis Drabelle reported in
Audubon
magazine:

There was still a hitch. The U.S. attorney for Wyoming balked at bringing a case against the rancher because he was sure that Herman Werner would never be convicted by a Wyoming jury. Werner ... made a surprise visit to [Nathaniel] Reed's office. "He simply bolted in," Reed remembers, "a wiry man wearing a Stetson hat. He said he was going to get me. I said quietly, 'Before you get me, please tell me who you are.' He said, 'I am Herman Werner, the man who protects his sheep by killing eagles. And you don't know anything about eagles.'"

The tough alternative newspaper
High Country News
took up the cause and public opinion began to quiver and shift. The U.S. attorney general pressed for prosecution. But Werner never came to trial. A few months before the court date, he was killed in a car wreck. In Wyoming, as the wool market declined and sheep men turned to cattle, as the fine for killing eagles greatly increased, as ranchers began to learn that the Department of the Interior had sharp teeth and that bald eagles were interested in carrion and fish, not lambs, the killings mostly stopped.

A very Wyoming touch to the whole affair is in the Werner Wildlife Museum at Casper College. The museum includes "an extensive bird collection."

 

Finally, after weeks of swinging in the wind, the bird feeder attracted a clientele—around fifty gray-crowned rosy finches. Rosies started coming in from everywhere. Chris Fisher in
Birds of the Rocky Mountains
put it well: "During the winter, Gray-crowned Rosy Finches spill out of the attics of the Rockies to flock together at lower elevations." So they were likely coming into this valley from both the Sierra Madre and the Medicine Bows. They rose into the sky for no reason I could ascertain, paused, and then returned to the feeder. There were no birds of prey in sight, no humans, no dogs or cows or snares, the wind was calm and the day sunny. Did they all fly up to spy out the land for distant threats? Or to reassert a (to me, invisible) hierarchy? Sometimes they flew to the trees near the river for a few minutes, then back to the feeder. I had to refill the thing several times a day.

The beautiful days had grown longer. One morning I watched one of the bald eagles dive toward an open stretch of water off the island, and I ran madly upstairs with the binoculars just in time to see it heave a fish onto the ice. It ate part of the fish and then flew to the nest. At ten past five the sun still gilded the top fifty feet of the cliff. One bald eagle was in the nest tree, the other flying downriver. The cliff turned the color of a russet apple, and I enjoyed the rare deep orange sunset smoldering under the edge of a dark dirty-sock cloud.

I bought a telescope and set it up in my bedroom, which has a grand view of the river and the cliff. The eagles weren't in sight but one of the elk was. Oddly, it seemed to be wearing a canvas jacket, different and lighter in color than its neck and haunches. Was it a trick of the light? It looked like a boulder in the middle. After an hour the elk stood up and disclosed the second elk lying close behind it. With the telescope, details leaped into prominence. The first elk pulled some tufts of hair from its back, then nibbled on sage or rabbit brush. The second elk became invisible again. There looked to be well over a hundred rosy finches at the feeder. I tried to walk along the river but the golden eagles became so agitated that I turned back. One golden angrily escorted me all the way to the house. I had once thought of inviting bird-watchers onto the property but I knew then that was impossible. The goldens had to have privacy.

A few days later I went for an evening walk on the old property-line road, keeping a quarter-mile distance between myself and the goldens. They came out but did not call, just flew along the cliff, watching me. Near the end of the property another pair of goldens appeared, silent and flying rather low as though also checking me out. Suddenly the nest pair came roaring east along the cliff and drove the strange pair away. I could see the new goldens settling in a tree to the east. Perhaps they were nesting there. Six eagles in three pairs in the space of a mile.

The next morning one of the bald eagles and a prairie falcon had a sky-filling quarrel, the falcon darting, the eagle swooping. The falcon disappeared suddenly. At noon the wind began to rise and in an hour it was lashing the cottonwoods. One of the bald eagles sat on a branch above the river watching for fish. The branch moved vigorously to and fro. With each lurch the eagle braced its tail against the branch like a woodpecker, and for some reason I found this endearing. Sometimes I thought of these birds as Evan Connell's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. The falcon flew around near the goldens' part of the cliff. The big birds were not in sight. Something about the falcon's busybody day bothered me. Was it looking for a nest site? In previous years they had nested at the far eastern end of the cliff near another pair of prairie falcons. Every bird the falcon came near seemed agitated.

Chickadees were rare at Bird Cloud. At my first Wyoming home, in Centennial, dozens of mountain chickadees came to the feeder on the lee side of the house every day, but I almost never saw them at Bird Cloud. Of course, Centennial was close to the forest and Bird Cloud was surrounded by open grazing land. The prevailing weather at Bird Cloud had, as its basic ingredient, a "whistling mane" of wind from the northwest. It built concrete snowdrifts in winter. In summer it desiccated plants, hurled sand and gravel, and dried clothes in ten minutes. The eagles, falcons, and pelicans loved windy days and threw themselves into the sky, catching updrafts that took them to mad, tilting heights. Why was it so windy at Bird Cloud? With the top of the cliff checking in at a little more than seven thousand feet above sea level the wind was almost never flat calm, and often like a collapsing mountain of air. The cliff directed the wind along its stony plane face as boaters coming down the river knew only too well. And because vast tracts of land to the west were heavily grazed cow pastures unbroken by trees or shrubs, the wind could rush east unimpeded. And this, I found, rereading Aldo Leopold's
Sand County Almanac
, was deadly for chickadees.