Warm weather visitors miss out on a special place at the tip of Homer Spit jutting out in the waters of Kachemak Bay. For 20 years, Jean Keene has been feeding fish scraps from a nearby processing factory to several hundred hungry bald eagles that winter near the 27-foot travel trailer that is her home. There may be only one other place in the world, also in Alaska, where a person can see this many eagles in one place. Each day between Christmas and early April, Keene offers birds a 500-pound buffet consisting of scraps of crab, halibut, herring and black cod that has been donated by seafood processors. Visitors who leave their cars to get a closer look at the powerful birds will hear her bark at them to get back into their cars.
People are delighted to see the birds.
In Wisconsin, where bald eagles have had a resurgence in the past decade, it is difficult to capture the beauty of a bird with a lens shorter than 400mm. Relying on experience, I packed a 400mm lens and 800mm lens, figuring I had all my bases covered. Once there, I did not need the long glass. The longest lens used by a German photographer visiting that day was a 300mm. Because he was shooting images for resale, one of his biggest challenges was being able to photograph a single bird in a frame - otherwise it doesn't look natural.