Soaring

What a fun day...I was back to getting enough time at the eagle's nest, watching the family go about it's daily business of getting food, and exploring the area. "Junior" as he's been called, was busy most of the day changing perches, receiving food from the parents and taking two trips to the north via the thermals. It's fascinating to watch him take off and go around and around and around until he catches a thermal, and once he's up to a particular altitude, off he heads.

Here is a good explanation:
Eagles fly higher than other birds when they use the Soaring type of flight. Actually, soaring is an easy type of flight- eagles just spread their long, rectangular wings for hours and beat it occasionally, letting the thermals of hot air carry them up to great heights like 3 miles above the surface. Thermals are groups or circles of warm air. (Like this-http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/nat... the broken lines represent the movement of the bird in flight.) As we know, warm air rises high up above the surface. To ride thermals, a bird must posses broad wings with large surface area- and eagles have large, broad wings. This is the reason why eagles fly higher than most birds , they ride and circle on these thermals which are rising at great heights, which other birds could not do because of the small surface area of their wings

Luckily I was able to get some great shots of him flying today, some when he left the nest after a meal, others of him just soaring. Check out my FLICKR photos...