28.0°

Partly cloudy, light breeze, temperature in the high 30s. A late April Audubon bird walk drew 15 birdwatchers at eight in the morning. Snow and ice still packed the trail through the woods, but the meadows near Crow Point and the Boy Scout camp were mostly clear. We were hoping for mountain bluebirds and sandhill cranes, both of which had been seen here recently, but no luck.

Nevertheless, there was much of interest to be seen or heard. The usual songbirds heard in the woods-chickadees, golden-crowned and ruby-crowned kinglets, winter wrens, varied thrushes. For me, spring has really arrived when the ruby-crowns are singing. Ravens passing through, talking. A pair of swans on Eagle River. A crowd of Barrow's goldeneye ducks on the river, accompanied by a long-tailed duck, a green-winged teal, and three scaup - probably greater scaup - and a kingfisher too.

We watched a northern shrike displace two eagles on top of spruce tree; eagles weigh about 66 times as much as shrikes. Several harriers, pale males and brown females, coursed over the meadows. A nervous snipe popped up and circled, high above the meadow, and dropped back into invisibility.

There seemed to be an unusual number of eagles hanging around. One may have been doing the "sand-lance dance" - prancing up and down on the sands where sand lance lie buried, and spooking them to the surface. We guessed that the other eagles were attracted by the many geese in the area. There were a couple of snow geese, a nice flock of white-fronted geese, and numerous Canadas - mostly the local Vancouver variety, but scattered individuals of different appearance.

Geese would be a super-sized prey for bald eagles, which can't usually carry prey weighing more than just a few pounds. But we found bloody evidence that something had demolished a goose: sizable patches of red-stained grass, rafts of goose-colored body feathers and down covering many square yards of meadow, and a few bloody feathers. Something, or several somethings, had wiped out a Canada goose, perhaps with a bit of a struggle, and eventually dismembered it and carried off chunks of carcass, leaving no bones. Eagles frequently prey on ducks and seem to be the most likely "perps" in this case.

As we strolled around the meadow, I noticed deformed tops of many of the spruce trees on the storm berm above the beach. Instead of a single, straight, upright leading tip, these trees often bore three leaders, or two crooked ones. We speculated that the numerous crows that give the area one of its names may perch so often on spruce tops that they damage the original leader, reducing its hormonal dominance over other shoots, and thus allowing side shoots to vie for the leader's position.

As we turned to head out for lunch, we encountered the desiccated carcass of a young harrier, which must have lain in the grass all winter. No telling how it died, but it gave us a chance to look closely at feathers, feet, and bill-always instructive.

• Mary F. Willson is a retiredprofessor of ecology.