Let your spirit soar
Roger Smith
Roger Smith
Nature revives my spirits when I’m feeling down. Think of watching an eagle soar upwards until it disappears into the blue, leaving the worries of the world behind.
Like so many humans, I’m envious of the ability of birds to fly. As a child I emulated eagles by making model airplanes. Gliders were my favourite because they flew at the whim of the wind, which worked for my contrarian nature. I once spent weeks making a glider only to lose it in a thermal – it just kept going up into the sky and I never saw it again. I felt no regret. That was my highest aeronautical achievement, to make something that flew so well it simply disappeared up into the vast beyond, like an eagle.
A pair of wedge-tailed eagles live in the hills behind our house. After a successful breeding year, we often see the adults and two youngsters slope-soaring in the wind rising up into the hills. While the adults hang motionless in the updraft, the youngsters mock-attack each other and their parents – our own private wildlife movie on many windy days!
During a recent morning walk on a country road near our place, I saw the two adult eagles perched in an old red gum waiting for a field of barley stubble beneath to heat up and generate warm air currents to provide them with lift. It ultimately occurred with my arrival, after which both birds took off, climbing rapidly on hot air generated within the stubble. With tail feathers splayed and wings thrust forward, they spiralled upwards in a thermal, the smaller male leading with the much larger female tracking him.
After about five minutes, at considerable height, the male left the thermal, powering off at high speed: eagles can travel deceptively fast in a flat glide, covering long distances without a wingbeat. As he neared the hills, he began a series of spectacular stall dives. From each shallow dive he rose steeply, stalled, folded his wings and plummeted 60m vertically before rising straight up, stalling and dropping again. He did this daunting manoeuvre over and over, folding his wings in and out but never flapping.
Watching, I became a boy again, wanting to be him! He was showing off to his mate, who was near me at first but instantly went to join him. Ornithologists call this “pair bonding”, but I prefer to think of it as aerial lovemaking. What could be more exhilarating, more romantic, than leaving the earth behind with your lover?
This all sounds like perfection, and it is. But it needs to be paid back. We have a duty to care for nature – for the solace given by eagles – for without nature we are nothing.
