"The Eagle" was one of my favourite and easiest to memorise poems from high school. Our eagles may not be clasping any crags, just gum tree branches, and the mountain walls are 20 kilometers away, but the rest is pretty true. They do seem to have a lonely existence. Even the chick sits alone in his eerie most of the day while one of his parents looks on from a distance and the other is out hunting. I have not yet seen any two of them get within meters of each other. Although at night I can only see one adult and I suspect that the other is in the nearby eerie keeping her chick warm.
The bottom two pictures are to give you some idea of how my poor camera is struggling to bring them up close. I have a 200mm telephoto lens that is doing a mighty job and a wobbly tripod that is doing its best, but these lovely birds like to be really high. So if the photos are not pin sharp, I hope you will bear with me.
If I can get a photo of one of them falling like a thunderbolt I will share it with you, but, like a thunderbolt, it happens very fast and furious. The bird is away with a fish almost before I have the camera at eye level.
The Eagle
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1809–1892 Alfred, Lord Tennyson
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
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