Reelfoot Lake - eagles

Captive bald eagle at Reelfoot Lake visitors center.

Click here to see my photos from Reelfoot Lake, January 2009.

Two photographer friends and I traveled to northwest Tennessee and Reelfoot Lake with hopes of some good opportunities to photograph bald eagles and any other wildlife that might present themselves. Reelfoot Lake is a unique environment - a very shallow lake that was partly formed by earthquakes of 1811-1812. The lake includes a lot of swampy area with vast tracts of farm lands surrounding it. Read more about the geography and history here. The flat terrain and easy access to a good bit of the shoreline would be helpful in spotting and photographing wildlife and lake edge scenic views.

We left Nashville on Friday afternoon (January 23rd) and made the trip in about 5 hours (including a leisurely dinner stop in Dyersburg) via I-40 and Highway 412. We stayed at the Cypress Point Resort, a modest resort that caters to fishermen and hunters.

I had arranged guide services with David Haggard, a long-time Reelfoot park ranger and naturalist, that I had found via web searches looking for Reelfoot eagle viewing. David met us before sunrise Saturday morning and took us to many of the spots around the Lake and along the Mississippi River levee where he had recently seen eagle activity. I felt the day got off to a good start when, as we were photographing sunrise from a pier on the southern shore of the lake, a couple of eagles flew close overhead and hovered in the steady northerly winds. The temperature was in the low 20s with the wind-chill in the single digits. We were prepared, for the most part, with plenty of layers, hats and gloves, and chemical hand warmers.

We spotted 30-40 eagles during the morning, but, unfortunately, none that presented good photographic opportunities. I was photographing with a Nikkor 300mm f4 and a 1.4 teleconverter while my friend, Keith, had rented a Canon 500mm f4 that he used with a 1.4 teleconverter. We did get to witness a pair of eagles land in a nest on the levee, but our view to photograph was pretty obscured with tree branches. We saw a group of 6 or 8 eagles feeding off an animal carcass in a flooded field, but we couldn't get close enough to get more that a small dark object in our viewfinders. We also witnessed a flock of pelicans flying across the lake, but the most impressive site was the thousands of snow geese that landed in small flocks about 150 yards from shore and then took off all at once.

Saturday afternoon our guide let us into the eagle cage that houses two captive eagles at the vistors center. The birds were very tolerent of our efforts and it was impressive to see the birds close up. To have an eagle with a 5 foot wingspan flying towards your head is enough to get your heart racing!

After a short afternoon break we headed back out to try and get some sunset shots in an area off of Walnut Log road. This area has some nice cypress trees in the water that you can frame with the setting sun. The temperature was dropping as darkness started to settle in and we were tired (and cold) from being outside most of the day so we headed to dinner at one of the local recommendations (Boyette's) and then retired to the motel.

Sunday we again got up before the sun in an attempt to capture sunrise. We headed to the Blue Basin area and were treated to 10 minutes of "fire in the sky" just prior to the official sunrise time. It was cloudy (Saturday had been cloudless all day) and there wasn't much color besides grey to everything. We drove back to a few of the places that we had spotted eagles on Saturday, but figured that, since there was much less wind, the birds were high-flying. We only saw a couple of eagles fly overhead at sunrise for all of Sunday. After breakfast we decided with the poor light and forecast of freezing rain moving into the area that we would head back to Nashville.

Reelfoot Lake offers a tremendous amount of photo opportunities and I'm hoping of making a trip back in mid-summer. Our guide had noted that mid-July is a good time to photograph wildflowers, blooming water plants, and ospreys that have taken up residence at the lake.

Here's a few of my shots from our Reelfoot Lake week-end: blackburnimages.com/albummaster.aspx?g=reelfoot2009