Leaving Home

Leaving Home

It was time.

      The babies had been hatched many months before. The feeding had been exhausting for the parents. They had been flying further away from the nest and it had been a bad year for the remaining small mammals that seemed to get better able to evade their clear-eyed stoops from high level as the year wore on. Their two children had grown with all the feeding. They were hungry with their mouths always open when the parents returned from their foreys away from the eyrie with their mobile larder of dead bodies - or fresh meat, depending on your point  of view. They started by looking like skinny chickens, ready for the oven, but gradually their feathers started to grow and as they did, the young birds grew to be the same size as their parents.

      It was unusual for there to be two youngsters at this stage. Normally the stronger and larger of the two would tip the smaller one out of the nest, to fall to its death on the ground below or to be be spiked on the waiting branches of the Douglas Fir. Less competition, one less mouth to share the available food with. Survival of the strong.

      The two young ones enjoyed their new feathers. They flapped their wings, took short exploratory hops around the nest. Tried to see if their wings would take their weight and transfer it to the waiting air but neither of them would take the ultimate, no way back, step of jumping off the nest.

      The adult birds circled high above the nest in the clear air, taking advantage of the rising thermals generated by the sun heating up the bare rock walls of the nearbye quarry. They called to each other; it was as if they were discussing their children’s future. They seemed to come to a joint decision, dropped a wingtip and circled down to their eyrie. The male eagle perched on a branch above the nest while the mother landed next to her children who, aparently sensing something was different, stopped their pleading for food  and closed their beaks.

      They all waited. The decision had been made. Today was the day, only the time was not known. The sun  shone, air rose in the tested thermals. The mother hopped across to the first chick and talked to it, persuavely, but nothing. The nearly fully fledged chick jumped up to the parapet of the nest. The mother called again – last minute instructions. Then the chick did the irrevocable, it jumped off, onto the waiting air. It dropped clumsily, spread its wings, waggled its tails and folded its feet under it.

      It was flying.

      It dropped twenty feet and felt the difference in pressure under its wings, felt the air rush past its staring, unseeing eyes, felt the pressures around its steering tail and found a thermal. It rose effortlessly, soaring with the warm air, the pressure lessened. It rose past the nest and screamed with ecstatic delight at its mother and sister. It was flying. This what it was born for. It experimented with the wing tips feathers, making and destroying the vortices, swooping, plunging and rising.

      It circled around the nest, called its sister to join  it. She did.  They soared and flew together. The greatest day of their life.

      They grew tired and hungry. It was time to return to the nest, to accept the congatulations of their parents and to gorge on some food to assuage the ravenous hunger they had built up with their aerobatics. They would be nurtured and fed for the last time today.        

      Tomorrow they would be taught how to hunt, they would go hungry until they learned how to catch their own prey. Once they could fly and hunt their parents would throw them out of the nest to make their own way in the world. A new generation.

      They were ready to leave home.