What brings a dozen people to a little parking lot along the banks of a half-frozen river?  What makes them stand there in the wind and cold, or huddle in their cars, for hours on end?  What makes them scan the sky and jump every time they spot the black dot of a bird high above?

It could be that they’re all a bunch of nitwits, which is certainly a thought that crossed my mind as I stood there among them, camera and telephoto around my neck, trying to keep my fingers warm in my gloves, staring up at an empty sky.

And then an eagle sweeps into view overhead and circles, still too high to get a good shot, but it’s enough to make you forget about the cold and understand why you’re out there.

I was in Lackawaxen, PA, on the shore of the river that separates the Commonwealth from New York.  This is where Bald Eagles come to winter.  The river rarely ever freezes over, and the open water becomes one huge fish market for the eagles, who feed along its length when most other waters are frozen over.

This is where you go to get incredible photos of eagles and hawks swooping low over the river, snatching fish from the water, and hopping around on the ice.  And those moments of raw nature do occur – just not all too often.

The real fact is, eagle watching is, like so many other things, 95% waiting and 5% sheer exhilaration.  The waiting is long and cold and boring, and your neck hurts from looking up at the sky.  Every so often you’ll spot the dark silhouette of a bird and it will pass overhead and even circle a bit, but always, it seems, out of range of your lens.

I spent several hours waiting, shivering and thinking to myself that perhaps this was a dumb hobby.  It was my first time going out to look for eagles, so I was still getting a feel for how it worked.  You read the brochure from the Eagle Institute and look at photos online, and you get the idea that the birds are all just there putting on this show, waiting for you to arrive and witness it.

But of course the truth isn’t like that at all.  And if you actually read the brochure, they tell you outright that eagle watching requires patience most of all.  Being typically impatient, I got bored at the first site along the river, and crossed the bridge into NY to check out two other designated sites down the road.  Both were a bust, so with the sun setting and both light and temperature dropping, I stopped back at the first area in hopes of finding an image to bring home.

When you pull into the parking lot and find a half-dozen cameras and spotting scopes all pointed at the same tree, you know you’ve got something good waiting.  In a tall pine across the road, there finally was an eagle.  All he did was sit on a branch and he was still too far away, but at least he was there and I was able to shoot frames.

All of these were copped quite heavily, and were shot at higher ISOs than I would have liked.  Which is why I will be going back to Lackawaxen in the coming weekends to try again.  Because like most of these photographic niches, once you get a taste of it, you’re hooked.