Wildlife alert! Eileen Anderson sent us this cell phone photo of a bald eagle at the Maple Leaf playfield on Friday.
“Are bald eagles seen often in Maple Leaf?” she asked. This one was perched at the top of a tree, being dive-bombed by one gull and one crow. “I hadn’t seen a bald eagle in the neighborhood before.”
The answer is, yes. Bald eagles are not an everyday occurrence in Maple Leaf, but they’re not rare either. A few months back there was a pair of eagles on Northeast 89th Street just west of 15th Avenue Northeast, also being mobbed by crows.
Simone Lupson-Cook, a birder friend who has written for Maple Leaf Life previously, recently said the eagles often seen at Green Lake have made forays here to raid nests for baby crows. Those eagles are known to have nested in Woodland Park.
During the war over preserving the trees at Waldo Hospital, mention was made of a bald eagle seen in one of the Douglas firs there.
Other raptor visitors to Maple Leaf include Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks, who are usually seen looking for prey near bird feeders. And many summers osprey (fish hawks) are seen overhead, or sometimes perched on the antenna tower at the Comcast building, Northeast 89th Street and Roosevelt Way Northeast, eating a salmon poached from Lake Union.
That was about the day I saw the same three-bird combo down here at work in Ballard!