Aquila chrysaetos

When I was 16 years old, my father took my siblings and me on a road trip through the western U.S. Our first stop was Yosemite, a place I had never been before, despite having grown up in the San Francisco bay area, only 4 hours away. As we descended towards Yosemite Valley via the west entrance, we made our way down the winding highway through a landscape badly burned in the forest fires of the 1990's. Huge blackened splinters of still standing trees peppered the otherwise barren hillsides. Coming around a sharp turn in the road, my dad suddenly braked hard, as the car flushed a massive Golden Eagle that had been resting right on the pavement. The bird was so huge, so foreign in appearance, I still have trouble believing it was real. Yet since that afternoon, and over the last 7 years that I've worked in the park and driven that road into the Valley, or back up to the high country, I scan the perches of those massive dead trees for the Golden Eagle.

Today, 13 years later, it was there.