WENDELL — In a pale winter sky, streaked with the first pinks of a new day, a massive, dark shape flew low.
A bald eagle.
It cruised over the Earl M. Hardy Box Canyon Springs Nature Preserve toward its feeding spot in the Snake River Canyon.
“We’re going to get this big guy come right close to us,” park ranger Eric Whittekiend said, awe in his voice. “He’s going to fly right over the top of us.”
The Hagerman Valley’s annual winter spectacle never gets old.
Migratory bald eagles roost in trees southwest of Wendell, feed along the canyon during the day, then gather again in the trees in late afternoon — in numbers that are hard to believe. And now is the perfect time to see them.
Bring your binoculars, your spotting scope, your camera and the longest lens you can get your hands on. This is a sight you’ll want to remember.
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“To me, it’s neat enough to see one or two bald eagles,” Whittekiend said on an early-morning excursion Dec. 22, “but to see a concentration, to me that’s really neat.”
You can do it the easy way. Or the hard way.
The easy way
The eagles start gathering here in early or mid-December and stay around until at least mid-February. To see a dozen — or a few dozen — roosting together, get to 1500 East by about 7:30 a.m. This county road southwest of Wendell, also called West Point Road, gives you easy access to some of the eagles’ favorite roosting spots, including the Box Canyon preserve, a unit of Thousand Springs State Park.
With binoculars or a scope, you can get awesome views of eagle-filled trees from roadsides and public parking spaces — even from the car window, if it’s just too cold to get out.
The best-known option is a big cottonwood tree beside West Point Service, a store and cafe at 3287 S. 1500 E. Dubbed the “Eagle Tree” by locals, it held at least 12 eagles in the pre-dawn of Dec. 22. But two days earlier, Whittekiend’s daughter and father-in-law had counted 99 in the Eagle Tree and the area around it. (Irrigation pivots in nearby fields are a good place to look.)
Just south of the store, turn west onto 3300 South and look for the big trees in a highway district work yard. (If it’s snowing, the highway crew will need to move equipment in and out of the yard, so don’t block the path with your vehicle, Whittekiend advises.) Without trying hard, we counted more than two dozen eagles in these trees. Don’t be late; by 7:40 a.m., the earliest risers started to fly off.
You missed the roosting eagles in the morning? They’ll return to the trees by late afternoon, so come again after 4 p.m.
And these are eagles of habit. They tend to fly the same paths when they leave those trees each morning and when they return in the afternoon. But the eagles change their travel patterns as goose-hunting boundaries shift or aquaculture producers’ dead-fish disposal changes.
So Whittekiend suggests visiting twice this winter: once to watch where the eagles go when they leave their roosts, and again to position yourself for seeing them in flight or during midday.
Box Canyon
Luckily for you, one popular flight path is right over the Box Canyon park unit.
Another mile south on 1500 East brings you to the Box Canyon parking lot beside 3400 South, where the irrigation pivots might be loaded with eagles. As the morning progresses, the park is a great place to watch them flying toward their favorite Hagerman Valley feeding spots or circling in the thermals above the spring-fed Box Canyon — the rising columns of warm air pushed up as cold air drops into Box Canyon.
For the best photos, get out and walk. The park doesn’t allow motorized access beyond the parking lot, so bring footwear for walking on a snow-filled dirt road. And follow the usual precautions for remote recreation, letting someone know where you’re going and when you’ll be back.
“If you happen to slip and break your leg, you could be out here for quite some time,” Whittekiend said.
Walking two-thirds of a mile brings you to an overlook where you can watch spring water bursting from Box Canyon’s vertical walls, forming a river from nothing. It’s a dramatic scene even when there aren’t eagles on the thermals. On winter mornings, steam rises from the springs, 54 degrees year-round.
In another third of a mile, you’ll find portable toilets.
The trails continue beyond that. It’s a two-mile walk from the parking lot to the edge of the Snake River Canyon, and a spur trail offers a hike down into Box Canyon.
You don’t have to stay on the trails if you want a closer look at an eagle-filled pivot or tree. The park’s boundary has an irregular shape, but it’s all fenced; don’t trespass on adjacent private property.
“It gets a lot of use — a surprising amount of use,” Whittekiend said, pointing to footprints littering the snow.
No wonder. In the span of a few minutes, half a dozen eagles flew overhead.
“These,” he said, “are the days I think, ‘Man, I have a terrible job.’”
The hard way
What, you thought hiking through the Box Canyon preserve was the hard way to see this spectacle? No, Gordan Hardcastle’s way is the hard way.
The Rupert art photographer doesn’t settle for images of eagles at rest. Anyone with a decent lens can get those. He wants photos in flight. And he wants the best lighting, which doesn’t begin until 9 or 9:30 a.m., long after the eagles leave their roosts.
“I have to know their habits, so I know where they’re flying by,” Hardcastle said during his Dec. 22 photography excursion along the county roads near Box Canyon, using a fence post as an improvised tripod.
Twice he armed himself with foot warmers and a flashlight and lay in the sagebrush — “about froze to death” — to observe a pre-dawn flight path from the Eagle Tree to the Snake River Canyon. In awe, he listened to huge wings beat 20 feet above him in the darkness.
To get one of his best eagle images last winter, he spent four hours waiting — on three days — then used the camera for 10 seconds.
“I put in 12 hours to get that picture,” Hardcastle said.
Hardcastle often parks along 3500 South, west of 1500 East, at 9 a.m. and waits with his 400 mm lens. (Tip: When Saturday hikers walk through the Box Canyon preserve, the eagles they disturb fly this way.)
One of his favorite afternoon spots is on the Snake River Canyon rim above both the wetlands fed by Banbury Springs and the old Camp Roach site, a former Boy Scout camp on Idaho Power Co. property. You’ll find Idaho Power’s small parking lot and a trailhead leading into the canyon at the west end of 3500 South. Pick a spot on the canyon rim to watch eagles cruising the river corridor, or follow the trail to look for eagles in the trees growing from the canyon wall.
Some afternoons, at 3 or 3:30 p.m., Hardcastle parks at the corner of 3300 South and 1400 East — and is rewarded by an eagle flying overhead every 15 minutes.
“It’s a waiting game,” he said. “Someone may sit there and not see any, and the next time they’ll see a dozen of them.”
One final location tip from Hardcastle: the road to the Ritter Island unit of Thousand Springs State Park. The island’s access road heads west from 1300 East, between 3200 South and 3300 South. Stop and park just before the road drops into the canyon, and you’ll be in a prime position for another eagle flight path.
Hardcastle learned that the hard way.
Park details
For the Ritter Island and Box Canyon units of Thousand Springs State Park, take Interstate 84 to Wendell, use exit 155 and head west on Hagerman Highway, then south on 1500 East.
Want to do more exploring while you’re there? The state park’s seven units are all within a short driving distance. A couple of units are right off I-84 at exit 147, between Wendell and Bliss. A couple more are accessed by U.S. 30 at Hagerman. For the last three units — including Box Canyon and Ritter Island — you can exit I-84 at Wendell and use county roads to approach the Snake River.
To print maps of each park unit, look for the “Maps and brochures” link on the left side of Parksandrecreation.idaho.gov/parks/thousand-springs.
The state park charges a daily $5 motor vehicle entry fee year-round — unless you have the $10 annual Idaho State Parks Passport available through the Department of Motor Vehicles. Each park unit has a self-pay box.