MacGougan at Large

Notes on A Trip to Norway - 6

Sea Eagles!

After our Day 1 hike, we hurried back to town for what was billed as a “RIB Safari”. This sounded to me like the barbecue equivalent of a pub crawl, but turned out to be a trip on a high-powered, inflatable boat. Where were we going? To see sea eagles!

First, however, we all needed to get suited up like the Michelin Man visiting a HAZMAT site. Here’s your intrepid reporter geared up for another perilous mission.

Here are some shots of the harbor and coastline around Svolvaer as we were being boated to the islands where the eagles roost.

When we got there, it became clear that this was more of a sure thing than, say, your average whale-watching excursion. There were a lot of birds out on those rocks, and they all knew that the RIB boats brought tasty fish that the captains would toss into the water.

We all had our phones out, looking to get good shots of the eagles. The elusive money shot is the moment an eagle snatches a fish from the water. The eagles are very fast, so mostly we got shots of water from which a fish had just been snatched.

Here are a couple of almost money-shot fish snatches.

Here are some other miscellaneous eagle shots.

What sticks with me the most from this outing? Maybe the seagull who hung around patiently on our boat. It deferred to the eagles, but still hung around in the probably-vain hope that there might be some fish left over once the eagles had eaten their fill. You’ve got to admire that kind of optimism.