It was the first week of January, and it was cold. Maybe you can remember what cold feels like.

My uncle was paddling me down the river not far from my house; we had a blind on the boat and I had just dropped a pair of drake mallards with one shot, as they crossed in flight 30 feet above the river. Right above that very shoal, in a huge sycamore where three limbs forked out over the river, a big white-headed eagle was carefully placing a piece of dead wood into a nest.

She was giving it so much attention she actually let us float beneath her without taking to flight, and she was so close you could see her eyes blink. That nest has been used in past years, and that day in the dead of winter, she was being driven by instinct to make it bigger and better. Women are all the same, they are never satisfied with a nice little place in the country.

I saw her again in February when we were catching bass only a mile or so down the river, and again in March and April, when walleye and white bass were getting most of our attention. I figured there were a couple of eggs in that big nest.

About the first of May, when I was drifting down the river hunting turkeys and catching a few fish right beneath her nest, she peered over the edge of it, looking at me with an evil eye that said she didn’t like seeing me there. An eagle can’t help but look mean when they are looking down at you. On that day, I kinda figured there was a young bird or two in that nest, but they were too small to see them.

Last week she was in a tree across the river from her nest, and standing beside the nest was one big dark eaglet, nearly as big as she was. My heart jumped, because so often I have doubted that nest could have survived the tremendous winds from recent thunderstorms.

Somehow, at least one eaglet made it, and now the worst is over. Sometime soon, she will take him and they’ll leave to see the world, maybe not so far away. But I suspect next January, she’ll be adding to that nest again. Her youngster will be who knows where, maybe off somewhere out west, maybe only a few miles off.

Someday though, that young eagle may raise its own young in that same nest. My daughter Christy, who is a biology teacher and state park naturalist, says there are nests out west on mountain crags they add to annually. She says that biologists estimate some of those old nests might weigh a ton or more, and have been used for decades.

All through the spring, and again last week, there was only that one mature eagle. I wondered where her mate might be, because usually even late in the spring, he is close by, helping to feed the young. I wonder if he may have been killed by something or someone. And you never know, it is entirely possible that the eagle I see there now is not the female, but the male.

It is unusual for only one bird to be attending to the rearing of the eaglet, but this time, it has worked. He looks to be a fine young bird.

First raincrow

On June 14, I heard the first raincrow stuttering away up here on Lightnin’ Ridge. Their call is loud, a little bit like hitting a hollow wood tube with a piece of metal, rapidly and repeatedly. It ends with a slowing, kowlping, clucking sound.

Old timers said when you hear that, the call of the yellow-billed cuckoo, or “raincrow” it will rain soon afterward. I have never known it to fail. It always rains within a few days of a raincrow’s call, somewhere.

These birds are late arrivers here, never heard before June on my ridgetop. And they are very, very hard to see, even though they are fairly large, bigger than a cardinal or mockingbird, nearly as large as a dove, but longer and thinner.

They have a yellow bill and a snowy white belly, and you’d think they would be easy to see, but not so. That’s because they seldom sit on a small branch. I saw one a week or so ago by stealthily stalking him, and he would actually look at me over the top of a limb nearly 10 inches in diameter.