ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: Weekly Newspapering in Rural Alaska

The Valley of the Eagles

Haines is located in The Valley of the Eagles.

Every winter, there are more bald eagles here than people, as the graceful winged predators swoop in from across the region for a last-gasp-of-autumn feast of late-running salmon.

People call Haines the true Home of the Bald Eagle and you can’t disagree. The local Chilkat Native American tribe was long ago divided into two clans: ravens and eagles.

Images of birds are everywhere; on the Indian totem polices and in the front entrance of IGA supermarket on Main Street in town. That’s where I took these pictures, from a slideshow of photographs and paintings by local artists.

I have done an injustice to their work, with my bad focus, lazy eye and off-center snaps. You have to see the originals to appreciate the majesty of the work and subject matter.

And I have myself fallen prey to the eagle worship that goes on here.

The best place to see the big birds is along the Haines Highway, the road that connects the Inside Passage with the town of Haines Junction in the Yukon Territory. As history goes, the route was first used by the Chilkat Indians and then became a packhorse trail to the Klondike goldfields in the late 1880s. In World War Two, the U.S. Army used it as a military access road.

Now Bald Eagles rule the roost.

Along the Haines Highway is the Chilkat River and the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve, which features miles and miles of prime eagle roosting and feeding grounds in the world’s largest congregation of Bald Eagles in one location.

And here’s why: The Chilkat River is home to the last salmon run in Southeast Alaska and between October and February, more than 3,500 Bald Eagles co-mingle within the 48,000-acre preserve to feed on the late-spawning salmon. The birds fly here from across the Yukon and Southeast Alaska, drawing hundreds of professional nature photographers.

So, why do the salmon run so late here?

As it turns out, the Chilkat is like most Southeastern Alaska rivers that descend from high mountain elevations and make a short and rapid run to the sea. It stays pretty-much ice free all year, creating a consistent water temperature that attracts large schools of spawning fish to lay their eggs.

The Tlingit name Chilkat means “many fish.”

And over the eons, the eagles got this figured out.

So did grizzlies, brown and black bears.

Each year, the American Bald Eagle Foundation, based here in Haines, sponsors a two-week celebration of the proud bird that has become our national symbol.

This year’s festival was themed “Aquatic Connections: It Flows Through Us all” and kicked off about the time I arrived in Haines. There are eagle-viewing trips and talks by wildlife biologists and native Americans, all celebrating the bird and other creatures here.

As you might imagine, this provides a feast for a small-town weekly newspaper. Most days, I was assigned to go take a picture of this speaker or that. There were so may talks, we couldn’t write about them all, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t all fascinating.

One biologist discussed her numerous eagle surveys around Haines. Another talked about the dragonflies of Alaska and another on how humans and polar bears coexist in Churchill, Manitoba, the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.”

There were eagle trivia nights and seminars on how to paint feathers with images of eagles like the Chilkat Indians used to do.

One night, I listened to a marine ecologist whose specialty was the foraging and diving behavior of top marine predators, primarily seals and sea lions. That night, she talked about why some harbor seals in nearby Glacier Bay National Park raise their young on ice floes from calving glaciers. It was gripping.

The final day of the festival brought the greatest spectacle of all: the release of two rehabilitated younger eagles back into the wild.

Both had been found wounded someplace near Anchorage and had become friends in captivity, so the decision was made to release the male and female pair together.

On a cold afternoon along the Chilkat River, 100 people gathered to witness the release. Two paid a few hundred dollars apiece as a charity donation to be the ones who actually opened the cages.

When the moment came, scores of professional photographers and locals there to bear witness, the eagles flew out of the cages like demons.

They flew straight out toward the cold blue river water. One banked around and circled us, as if to make sure we had known what we were doing.

Then they both were gone.

It was another priceless moment in The Valley of the Eagles.