The screams of Sky-King warned me again as I came to pay my second call to their nest even before I recognized the landmarks about the place. This time the bald eagle’s mate was not brooding. She stood beside the nest, oros.store as though she had dropped some task at my approach. I studied Sky-King this time through my glasses, before he decided to leave his lookout on the dead spruce. At each angry scream, the golden scimitar of his beak parted. He half spread his wings, and threatening rage showed in his every gesture. While I climbed up both eagles hung close above the tree, wheeling and screaming.

I came abreast of the nest and raised myself eagerly on my climbers, to look in. The weeks of patient brooding had borne fruit. The three white eggs were transformed into three fuzzy, gray eaglets that lay sprawled out on the soft lining of the nest, sound asleep. skywings

Three babies they were, but of course, not triplets. Like all birds of prey, Sky- King’s mate had begun to brood the day her first egg was laid. That egg had been first to hatch, and the eaglet that came forth free was at least two, and perhaps four or five, days older than the youngest of the brood. The difference was plainly apparent in size and strength as they staggered up at the sound of my movements in the nearby form of the tree. affluentwords

In one detail, they were alike; the eyes of all three holding the proud, fearless stare of Sky-King’s race! There came, unexpectedly, a soft breath of wind from behind and above me. I looked up to see Sky-King wheeling by, no more than a foot from my face.

He did not check his flight, did not scream, nor thrust out his cruel yellow talons in my direction. He only floated by as though he would watch closely my dealing with his young. Did I not say he was my friend? Time after time while I stayed there beside his nest, he swooped down through the branches, coming so close each time that I could have reached up and touched him, and yet he made no threatening gesture. Alfao

When I climbed higher, away from the immediate vicinity of the nest, he and his mate likewise mounted, far above the tree tops and, before I had finished and climbed down from the tree, they had perched together in the top of a dead pine two or three hundred yards away where they watched me with only an occasional warning scream. Cellboost