A Feast in the Skagit Flats: When Eagles and Hunters Cross Paths

A juvenile bald eagle flying in with the leftover scraps of a hunter’s processing.

I had never seen so many eagles in one place.

Skagit Flats, Washington, isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of wildlife spectacles, but as we drove past open fields, something caught my eye—dozens of dark shapes moving along the ground, their white heads flashing against the earth. Then I looked up.

They were everywhere!

Bald eagles filled the trees, circled the sky, and crowded together in the fields, squabbling over scraps. The source? Hunters. The remains of their kills had been left behind, and the eagles had gathered in astonishing numbers to claim what was left.

Dozens at a time

Bald eagles scavenging the scraps thrown out while processing a hunter’s catch.

It was an eerie kind of beauty—majestic birds reduced to scavengers, surviving off the excess of human excess activity. Some might see it as a win, a moment of nature adapting. Others might see it as something else: a world where wildlife is pushed to rely on what we leave behind.

The bald eagles are in very low numbers this year by the Skagit River, and they are plentiful here on the Flats. We’ve taken away their real source of food and nutrition - the salmon and steelhead - with our dams, and excessive taking through trawlers and other harmful activities. And we’ve now decided we can throw out the excess from hunters to eagles, treating them like seagulls, then calling them “pests” because they flock in the hundreds.

While deep down I believe there is hope in humanity, it takes a lot of patience not to lose the sight of it.