Raptors' Paradise

With some energy from a local doughnuts and coffee that barely crested above truck stop quality, Nancy and I left Nashville under a pinkish dawn. The state’s most remote corner beckoned. Cutting up from Jackson, we skimmed Dyersburg and crossed the old Mississippi floodplain, passing Ridgely, Tiptonville and other towns subsisting on the floodplain.

After a right turn in Tiptonville, birthplace of rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins, the serene blues of Reelfoot Lake broke through the lakeside strands of bald cypress. A brief walk along the water revealed the lake’s brief history. During New Madrid earthquakes in the early 19^th century, the Mississippi ran backwards, overrunning its banks. The water stayed in what became Reelfoot Lake. Despite being quite shallow, the lake boasted an immense cypress shoreline and an enviable winter residency of raptors and waterfowl.

Barely 10 minutes passed without clusters of gunfire. Empty trailers at boat launches gave away the enormous squad of hunters skulking in the marsh. A small enclosure hosted several eagles unable to return to the wild (because if they are healthy eagles, they don’t belong in a net-topped cage.

After walking the cypress boardwalk, where two women scrambled for their cameras to snap the blue heron we see every day in Nashville, we headed onto the lake’s forest in hopes of spotting eagles. No eagles appeared, but the Reelfoot ecosystem had an amazing crop of birds. Any given phone or electric wire had an American kestrel waiting to feast upon field denizens.

We couldn’t be sure where to find them. The maps the state park provided were just photocopies of satellite images with marks for the eagle nests. They were not meant for navigation, but for selling seats on their eagle tour buses. Navigating without them prove no more fruitful. One signed advertised a lake where no road or other entrance could be found. Another seemed like a trailhead, with a parking lot and picnic tables. Three hundred feet later, the former trail ended at impassable thickets. We came to boat launches with shorelines obvious for trails yet found none.

Low and on gas and in need of direction, the lake’s national wildlife refuge solved the latter problem. On a simple map, a ranger sketched out a maze of eagle nests and sitting posts. His scribbles detailed every spot where we would encounter masses of birds for our duration in the wildlife refuge. These bird trackers spend their days monitoring the birds, their hunting grounds and their nesting sites. Before filling the tank, we passed deeper into the Grassy Island unit of the refuge. Past a church and a boat crowded by pickups with boat trailers, we reach a meadow breaking up the forest.

We started to pass when a large shape disrupted the flooded grass. I had seen eagles in the past, at a distance and at a glance, in Indiana and Washington. I had seen nothing like this.

The nest-builder takes a rest.

Our day’s first eagle had talons overflowing with twigs. Once their migration ended at Reelfoot, they wasted little time in home construction. January was nest-building time for wintering eagles, with eggs laid in February. 

We stopped as the eagle landed in branches 15 feet above us, resting at the worst possible angle for pictures. Nancy got one with my camera. I thought I could sneak out quietly enough that the eagle would not mind.

No sooner than I slipped through the door did it prove me foolish. Silently flexing and soaring, the eagle twisted its wings and wove through the bare trees. Yet we could have turned around right there and been satisfied. It was as close as we could get all day.

At the Grassy Island observation tower, a little platform at the end of a short jetty, we scanned the lake for more eagles. High above us came a shrill warning. A hawk belted a piercing call and soared on unseen currents, disappearing from view as it grew close to the relentless noontime sun.

The fingers of bald cypress stretched out into this quiet section of Reelfoot Lake. Without their leaves, they were prime eagle hunting posts. In a spine of trees extending into the lake sat a solitary eagle. At first glance I couldn’t tell if it was a juvenile bald eagle (brown feathers flecked with white) or something else. The binoculars won’t lie.  Aside from a twitch of the head, this eagle barely moved.

After a gas stop, we crossed the Kentucky border on a dusty plain. Above us, a second red-tailed hawk rode the currents hundreds of feet above the fields. In vacant farm fields, clouds of birds nestled down. Near a marshy site in Kentucky, a red-winged blackbird swarm ascended, their combined wings producing colors across the entire spectrum.

Eagles patiently watch the snow geese swarm.

A flutter of white down the road attracted us, and here we found the snow geese the ranger had sketched out. Thousands of birds loitered around an ephemeral lake, while small flocks of a dozen or less flew and landed all the time. They chattered in a constant squawk that rose and fell depending on the number of vehicles watching them.

Down the road, a second observation platform sat at a gate blocking a flooded gravel road. Rain had turned these fields into marsh, with birds zipping through the tall grasses and bare trees. Through the field glasses we spotted two adult eagles sparring, playing or conducting a mating ritual in the marsh’s airspace before settling back into the trees. Then a vulture intruded. The forests were not huge, but any raptor stopping two or three trees deep could not be found with our binoculars.

Snow geese ascend above Reelfoot.

Driving past the geese flock again, we noticed cars stopping on the opposite side of the road. Glancing back, I saw that stopped them. In a patch of trees within striking distance of the goose-heavy beach, three juvenile eagles sat among the top branches. Nearby, an adult eagle also observed the flock.

Perhaps having noticed their observers in the treetops, the geese finally took off in an abrupt tornado. Thousands of birds twisted into the air, their squawks reaching a fever pitch. They burst into the air only to funnel down on the other side of the road.

Looping back to the lake’s southwest corner, we ended the loop with a brief shore walk through a cypress forest. In the visitor center, a room housed a dozen snakes, venomous and harmless. Walking without fear of disturbing a rattlesnake gave us a little extra freedom to traipse along the forested shore.

Tracing our way back toward the interstate, the road hosted an impressive population of red-tailed and Cooper’s hawks, most swooping toward quarries we could not see thanks to this winter’s brightest golden hour. Bird ruled Northwest Tennessee; we were only visiting.