On Wings of Eagles

This is a composite picture of the many Bald Eagles flying over the Ninilchik River area.

Hello. Ting Lee here. Just wanted to give you the lowdown on what I've been doing during the past seven months.
Today will be one of the more memorable of my life. We are, I'm told, on the banks of the Ninilchik River on the Kenai Peninsula. I got my first exposure to the giant bird you know as the Bald Eagle. Not just one.... but seven of them flew over, swooping and looking very menacingly at me. Now, I'm no fancier of bird flesh – I mean, I always get excited when I see birds chattering away – but these birds are 'way out of my league. They are huge. They have enormous talons. They do have a funny cheep that they make and it seems too small for their size. They were drafting on the uplifts from the cliffs at the mouth of the Ninilchik River. I'll never forget these birds.

Robert and Jo went into a church in Ninilchik that had been built by the Russians back in the 1800s when their fur traders sailed this coast. They met up with a man dressed in black, with ringlets hanging from his head. I didn't get into the church – unseemly for a cat to be in a church, the parental units said. But the man explained why the Russian Orthodox cross has two crosspieces on it, the lower one tilting up to the left. “This is pointing to the good thief on the cross beside the Lord Jesus Christ,” he said.
Robert asked about the congregation and the man explained there are only 20 people now who worship in the church. The services are mostly in English, although the older members like the Slavic tongue to be used, the priest said. “But all who lived here in the past come and are buried here when they die,” he said.

Robert said he noticed there were three new graves, in the cemetery. The cemetery is completely overgrown with weeds, so the 20 members of the congregation seem to have lost their need to maintain.

The man explained that the church leadership now resides in Long Island, New York. There are no ties to Russia since the Communist Revolution of 1917.

The parentals left me in the evening and returned to the mouth of the Ninilchik River. There, they spent the evening photographing more Bald Eagles. They said the eagles land on their prey like lions. All the gulls makes way for the eagles but are not happy to do so. They skulk around in circles and cry out their annoyance – very similar to hyenas at the water holes of Namibia, Robert says.

Two juvenile eagles and their papa landed together on a spit of land off the river mouth. They worked at tearing the discarded entrails of a halibut between them. Then, they split up and the mature adult flew off down the stony beach where he landed and offered himself up for a great portrait.

In the meantime, the fishermen, in their sturdy aluminum craft, headed back toward the mouth of the river. There were more than 65 boats crowding the mouth of the river, waiting for enough water to permit them to enter. A couple of boats edged in but immediately ran aground. One smaller boat came through, creating a giant wake and he rocked the stuck boat off the bar. But mostly the others had more patience and just waited for the tide to rise enough to permit entry around 10:30 at night.
There they unloaded their catch – halibut and salmon – into plastic containers. These were weighed then iced at the dock and loaded into a truck for transportation. The young girl who shoveled the ice and moved the boxes seemed to have the hardest job in the world. Her dad ran the forklift.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010
This morning we arrived in Homer, Alaska. This is on the most southerly spit of land on the Kenai Peninsula and is the halfway point, more or less, of our journey. Now we will head north and east after a few days.
We now have traveled 7,055 miles.