"Look! That's a big bird." "Is it a seagull?" "It looks too big to be a seagull." "Its coloring is wrong."
The grey-and-white bird soared slowly, 40 feet above the surface of the lake as we stood on the shore. It was perhaps 100 yards away. It continued to slow. Suddenly it saw something. In half a second it folded its wings in so that they were no longer lift-creators but steering vanes, killed its forward velocity, and turned itself head-downward.
Then it stooped. It seemed to hold motionless for a split second. Then it began to fall toward the water. In the first half-second of its dive, it fell only four feet. In the second half-second, it fell twelve feet. In the third half second, it fell twenty-feet, disappearing behind a tree just before it hit the water.
About ten seconds later we saw it climbing slowly, with something large still wriggling in its claws. It painfully gained altitude, and headed off toward the western ridge. "Well, seagulls don't do that!"
"An immature bald eagle or an osprey," I said. "An osprey," said Michael the twelve year-old. "Eagles and ospreys perch in trees near the water to eat their kill unless they are carrying it back to their nest."
A beautiful nature scene? Yes, and no. The osprey was certainly "natural." But we stood on an eight foot-wide asphalt-paved well-graded 2.7-mile trail around the lake. And the lake was unnatural: created in the middle of what is now a suburb by an earth dam. It was supposed to be a drinking-water reservoir, but everyone says the water tastes really bad, and EBMUD never uses it as such. Instead, EBMUD stocks it with fish--trout--every week during the spring and fall. The trout, unfamiliar with the lake and newly released, are easy prey to the raptors.
It was a beautiful bird to see...
