The two Prairie Falcons are playing in the wind currents along the face of the cliff, shrieking and crying. One carries the hindquarters of a long-tailed rodent, pausing at times to land and rend its prey and eat, or sometimes simply eating on the wing. Another perches on an old hawk nest and screams. Watching them, something opens in me: a moment of grace.
This is why I go birding.
The Prairie Falcons weren't unexpected; we came here to Petroglyph Point hoping to see them during our weekend in Klamath Basin, a high-desert section of the Klamath River watershed that straddles the California-Oregon border. The wetlands in this area host millions of waterfowl wintering or migrating along the Pacific Flyway each year, and the largest congregation of Bald Eagles in the lower 48 states. The eagles are opportunists who come to scavenge on dead and weakened geese and ducks. Their numbers peak in February, just before the waterfowl begin winging their way back to northern breeding grounds.
It would be interesting to know if the eagle diet (and distribution in the region) varies now from what it was two hundred years ago, when salmon were bountiful in…
