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Wish I'd had the presence of mind on a September day to photograph the bald eagle off the glider's wingtip and, later that afternoon, the three kettles of hawks, but no. I did not.
Amazing, isn't it, how often we see these magnificent birds when we fly? Fly almost any other type of aircraft, and such encounters bring to mind the dry term "bird strike".
In our world it's different, almost like an encounter with the spirit world. We glide by four or five, maybe dozens of hawks who have found a thermal and we recognize that we have a special connection with them, and we fly out of their way, we fly around them, we circle and we take a long, long look because we know the moment will pass and we want to, need to remember this.
And once in a blue moon there's a bald eagle. Sharing a thermal with one is like winning a lottery. How on Earth did you manage to stumble across such luck? When it appeared off the wingtip today I didn't catch on right away. I'm not that bright and besides, I was concentrating on being the World's Greatest Pilot (with not much success).
I thought, 'That's odd. That hawk just off the wingtip has a white head and a white tail' and by the time it disappeared -- where do they vanish to?? -- I realized I'd had an encounter with a bald eagle. There are places where glider pilots and hikers see them more often. Bald Eagle ridge in Pennsylvania, for example.
They are a lot less obvious in southern Ontario, except at migration time, and anyone up in the sky in a slow moving, circling, quiet airplane is the likeliest of humans to encounter them.
Terry McElligott / Juliet Tango DG-200
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