January 12th, 2008 Minnesota River Eagles – Blackdog

The sun suddenly came out, so I headed South about a mile to Blackdog Road between I-35W and Hwy 77. I saw 6 Eagles at about 3 locations. The first I saw immediately at the little parking lot just off of I-35W flying further West. I saw quite a few people parked on the North side of the Minnesota River at the boat landing at the end of Lyndale Avenue. I went a mile up the road to the observation area parking lot. Blackdog lake was clear of ice in a large area but, I did not walk out to the observation deck to check it. An Eagle was directly across the River sitting in the tree. It had shifted trees as I pulled into the parking lot, so I setup a tripod next to the road and proceeded to wait for 45 minutes standing in the snow waiting for the bird to move. Quite a few people were cruising Blackdog looking for Eagles, and I watched as quite a few stopped on the road sometimes for as long as 10 minutes about 50-100 feet away from a parking lot blocking one lane of traffic entirely. Quite a few people came and went. I was mostly shooting with a 70-200 Canon F4/L which is not even close to long enough (although the 1.6x digital crop factor does’nt hurt), along with the ZenithStar 66 (William Optics 66mm SD Doublet APO 388mm F/5.9). The Eagle never moved, I figured with everyone else setting up tripods comming and going my chances were pretty good that the Eagle would take off when someone packed up and went back to their car, no such luck the Eagle won. Not seeing any activity (other than ducks) on Blackdog Lake I did not bother to check the observation deck over the lake. Just outside the Beautiful Blackdog power plant situated in the center of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge at least a dozen cars were parked shooting two Eagles in a tree. I decided to head to Ft. Snelling State Park (the park has a large chunk of land on the South side of the Minnesota River) and turned around and headed back to Blackdog. I parked outside the entrance to Blackdog to watch the two Eagles sitting in a tree for the next couple hours. One Juvenile flew directly overhead, every now and then I saw an Eagle down or up River as well. The two Eagles would occasionally fly down river (near an Eagles nest) and back every now and then.

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