190 
THE CONDOR 
Von. XI 
the evident tinge of anxiety in the note which became more intense as one 
approacht the nest. During the frequent quarrels over fish, the eagles often gave 
forth lusty screams; and they sometimes announced in the same manner their 
arrival at the nest when they returned from the bay with a fish. 
Perhaps as much as any of the other Alaska birds, the bald eagle is confronted 
with feasts in the summer-time and frequent famines in the winter. After the fore 
part of July, when the salmon begin to run, no eagle need be without food. The 
brown bears may levy the first tribute on this numberless host from the ocean but 
the eagles will often be found congregated about the mouths of the larger streams 
even before the salmon begin to run. The Glacous-winged Gulls are fastidious 
about their salmon and will often pick the eyes out of a fish that gets stranded on a 
shoal, and may not even stop to kill it. The eagle is not guilty of this as far as I 
have been able to discover, but feeds on decayed or partially decayed fish almost 
as readily as on live ones that could readily be caught. The fact is, he is too lazy 
to catch fish when dead ones are lying about, and he does not care if they are 
somewhat tainted. The stomach capacity of this bird was a revelation to me. 
One large female that I shot weighed fifteen pounds; but I found that about three 
pounds of this was salmon, which, altho it had just been swallowed, was anything 
but fresh. This feasting upon salmon lasts until the gigantic table-spread, the first 
snow, is laid over the salmon strewn gravel bars in the rivers. By this time the 
eagles have become as oilv, fishy and plump as the natives themselves. 
From October to April the eagles have need for the fat that has been laid up bv 
salmon feastings, as they have to live on what few water fowl and fish they can catch. 
I have been told that two or three of these eagles sometimes kill half-starved deer 
during the coldest, hardest part of the winter; and since my friend, whose truthful- 
ness has never been doubted during two years of close association, was well ac- 
quainted with the birds, I do not discredit the story. 
The agility and watchfulness of the bird was well illustrated by one which 
swoopt after a wounded Old-Squaw that fell just out of gunshot of the boat. The 
wounded duck escaped temporarily by diving; but the eagle was waiting every time 
that it came up and finally the dives become shorter and shorter until at last there 
were none and the eagle carried the duck off to the timber. Judging from the 
amount of duck feathers in and about a nest on April 30, these birds must live 
largely on ducks during the migrations. 
By the first of May the eagles are on the lookout for schools of herring that 
usually make their appearance about this time. One afternoon I noticed a commo- 
tion out in the bay where a flock of loons were fishing, then an eagle left a nearby 
perch, swoopt down, struck a fish in the water and returned to his perch where he 
gave a shrill scream. At the sound, eagles began to come from all directions to 
the spot where he had secured his fish, and within five minutes there were more 
than twenty eagles assembled. Only the first ones secured fish, as the fish which 
had evidently been driven to the surface of the water by the loons, went down 
again; the eagles returned to their perches to begin another vigil and soon all was 
quiet again. 
The accounts that I had read, and the few photos that I had seen, led me to 
picture in my mind a large bald eagle’s nest placed, preferably, in some dead and 
decaying tree that stood out in the exposed portion of some wooded point. This 
may be the case in parts of the country, but it certainh^ does not apply to the bald 
eagle in Alaska. In the first place dead trees do not last long there. They are 
comparatively scarce and do not afford much protection from the wind. In the 
second place the birds rarely build at thy extreme end of a point of timber, but go 
