Oh Dem Baldies

At the Iowa I-80 Welcome Center just over the Mississippi River, we picked up an Eagle Fact-Finder Statistics flyer. It had a whole lot of interesting facts about the bird we were looking for last week.

We had already figured out that young bald eagles did not have the tell-tale white-feathered heads. They don't get them until after their third year. So, if your're out eagle watching and see a bird the same size as a bald eagle, but without the white markings, you're looking at a juvenile.

In the air, wing beats are rather stiff and shallow and then there is a lot of gliding. When soaring, the wings are nearly flat.

Its voice is a rather weak, flat, chirping whistle, stuttering and variable. Definitely not the sound you'd expect to hear from such a magnificent bird.

Something I didn't know was that the male eagle is smaller than the female, but both are similarly marked, not like the male-female difference on smaller birds where the male is much more strikingly marked.

It's life span is generally 30-50 years.

More to Come. --RoadDog