EAGLE EYES

Where I flew in northern Vermont we soared with red-tail hawks daily, but for some reason eagles were exceedingly rare. Once though, I came upon a sovereign golden in a blue thermal and decided to just follow along and see what it could teach me. Several times it left good lift sooner than I expected and moved on, quickly finding more nearby. We meandered across two big mountains before I lost courage and turned for home, forever transformed by the lesson. I’d love to have had the exemplar endorse that hour in my logbook, but who knows if it held a current CFI.During those years of soaring only in New England I heard and read some mumbo about shearlines but had never experienced one. Apparently the atmosphere becomes so homogenous as it moves across a continent, shears between dissimilar air masses don’t occur in that part of the world.The exception? One late afternoon I found two osprey (aka fish eagles) cruising straight up the middle of a valley, maintaining altitude while hardly ever flapping. Mile after mile I followed, puzzled over what was keeping us up. Then a wispy cu formed ahead directly in our line of flight and it began to make sense. Cool mountain air was flowing down from both sides and converging here in the middle, a textbook example of katabatic lift which hang glider pilots call ‘wonder winds’.What I wonder is why that was the only time I saw this. How many days had it occurred without my knowing? Obviously one should be more observant. What I learned was ancient knowledge newly revealed by tutors with scarcely more than feathers for brains. As it should be.At a place where eagles appear almost every flight we’d observed two fledglings soaring together for weeks, so on a day off I brought my camera hunting in the mountains. It took longer to catch them than to find them, and I thought that was the fun part until - who’da thunkit - while circling line abreast, they widened out and let me ease the 1-26 between them. Imagine climbing to 12,000 feet with an eagle off each wingtip! Downright glorious.If their mother were watching would she have been horrified? And if so, then what? I’ve been attacked by eagles three times after getting too cozy, and each of them flew away first, almost out of sight, then homed straight back in nose to nose.One came so close I could see its eyes from the back seat as it passed under! We had a video cam mounted forward and held position long as I dared before pulling up - to begin fantasizing about that most unlikely piece of footage. Naturally (amazing how often this happens) the frontal assault began mere seconds after our film ran out.Om.And apropos or no, simply because it’s true, there’s this. As the only glider guider in a ride operation at a summer resort, I had the liberty of flying approaches any way I chose. Just my luck a pair of bald eagles had their nest atop the tallest pine, perfect spot to dive from downwind leg, cut a 2G turn around them and pull up into a normal base. When not in the nest they often perched on a big shaded branch below, so it paid to look close. Passengers squoze in back always loved it and the eagles never seemed to mind, or even react as we swept by...