October 4, 2026 - Mark Primiano, Guest Birder

Many, many thanks to Dr. Mark, who sent me several photos with text to have in reserve; necessary since today I am low on both physical reserve and inspiration.

He has also been kind enough to allow me to interrupt his piece to grind my own axe about bird identification. What a mensch. Welcome again, Dr. Mark...

Where:  August 1-2, 2026

When: Wisconsin River in the Driftless Area

Bird of the Day: eagles

It's not a terribly original thought, but I think one of the coolest things that has happened in my lifetime (I'm 38) is the resurgence of eagles (especially bald) in America. I grew up in Chicagoland and the only place you could see them when I was little was at zoos. Now if you go near any reasonable body of water, you have good odds of seeing one. There's at least one or two that appear a mile or so from my house on the Chicago River every year on the north side of the city.

I started going on the annual canoe trip in 2021 and we would all be super excited to see a bald eagle. We're still excited when we see one, but now there's a joke bet about how many we will see over the two days on the water (seven this past year). 

Sara Kate here: this is where I'm going to interrupt. There is another eagle coming up, and I have been wrestling with it for days. It has been making me crazy.

Mark and his group had it down as a golden eagle, which I have never seen. I think it could be a juvenile bald eagle, but there is no scenario where I'd swear to it. I wanted to be sure I had it right, since I failed to spot the difference between a great horned owl and a long-eared owl last week.

So I turned to my most hated ornithological enemy: research.

Needless to say, this is annoying. Obviously, there are some reasonably clear points of comparison, but Mark gets the same kind of photo every birdwatcher gets that isn't also a wildlife photographer or the owner of a $3400 camera: at a distance, nothing for scale, largely dependent on whether in sun or in shade. I am going to drop us back into Mark's words here along with his photo, which is dreamy.

This golden eagle (and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong again) was a new one, at least in the wild (the same day that the owl came to my Vegas shelter, we got a juvenile golden eagle). Everyone started noticing it in the tree from probably a thousand or so feet out and got quiet, turning off any music playing in our boats. The hope was that it wouldn't take off before we could get close enough to see what exactly it was. It was easily bigger than any baldie any of us had ever seen. It stayed in place as my canoe slid under the tree and I was able to get the picture:

SKW again: don't ask me, man.

According to multiple sources (please clap), this is how you distinguish a golden eagle from a juvenile bald eagle:

• Golden eagles have chocolate brown plumage; juvie baldies are dark brown. Fuck off.
• Golden beak is dark and stays dark except for a bright yellow cere. Bald beak is dark at first and then turns all over not as bright yellow. Also fuck off.
• Goldens have feathers down to the feet, baldies have bald feet. This is the one that is supposed to be the most definitive. I cannot see his feet.

The rest is about flight behavior or heavily depends on having them stand right fucking next to each other. Feel free to make like MAHA Republican and do your own research; there are only about a million articles discussing this exact conundrum.

I did some crops and edits but couldn't tell if I was subconsciously pushing the result in one direction or another, like a guilty widow with a Ouija board planchette. I want it to be a golden! The one I'm least likely to correctly identify, because I've never seen one.

Since I can't see the feet, today I am leaning towards juvie bald eagle, for this:

"The white patch on the tail of a young Golden Eagle is also much clearer and contrasts strongly with a dark terminal band. Juvenile Bald Eagles also have a white on the underside of their tails, although it tends to be mixed with darker plumage, resulting in a weakly defined band." [here]

But that's literally the only reason, and I change my mind almost every time I look. When I say, "sound off in the comments," this time I really hope you will! What do you think?

All this to say, efforts to ID a bird are, in my experience, the very worst part of seeing a bird. A lot of the time I'll just say to myself "unidentified warbler" rather than have to make a decision and list a bird I'm not sure about, which means there are a lot of birds I've probably seen and never listed. Particularly re: water birds - I've either never seen a lesser scaup, or else I've seen a dozen.

But I can easily imagine the feeling of seeing this bird from a canoe, a beautiful sunny day on the river, an annual get away with friends, something you've never seen before, something that makes you all sit up and take notice, and dial in, and pay attention, and look. Who needs a scientific name for that?