Bald eagle Klamath Basin
— — the morning a thousand wings lift off the ice.
Not only on a wall.
“The Klamath Basin in winter holds one of the largest gatherings of bald eagles in the lower forty-eight. They roost in the old-growth firs above Bear Valley and fan out at first light over the frozen marshes of Lower Klamath and Tule Lake. The cold is real. The count, some years, has crossed five hundred. from the studio
Bald eagle Klamath Basin, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Klamath Basin straddles southern Oregon and northern California, a chain of shallow lakes and managed marshes administered as the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex. Six refuges totalling roughly 200,000 acres sit on the Pacific Flyway, hosting more than a million migrating birds each fall. Lower Klamath, established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, was the first waterfowl refuge in the United States. Bear Valley Refuge, west of Worden, Oregon, is the bald eagle night roost — a stand of old-growth Douglas fir and white fir on a north-facing slope above the basin floor.
Eagles arrive in November as the high country freezes and stay through February. Peak count usually falls in mid-January, when the basin holds the highest concentration of wintering bald eagles in the contiguous United States — historic counts have crossed five hundred birds in a single morning. They feed on waterfowl weakened by cold and on carrion at the edges of the ice. The Bear Valley fly-out happens in the half hour before sunrise; viewers gather at a Highway 97 pullout south of Worden and watch the silhouettes lift off the ridge in twos and threes.
The Bear Valley fly-out viewing site is a gravel pullout on U.S. Highway 97, about four miles south of Worden, Oregon. Arrive forty-five minutes before sunrise, dress for single digits Fahrenheit, and bring binoculars; the refuge itself is closed to entry to protect the roost. The auto-tour loop at Lower Klamath, ten miles south on Stateline Road, is the better daylight circuit — roughly twelve miles of gravel through flooded fields where eagles perch on muskrat lodges and fence posts. The annual Winter Wings Festival, hosted by Klamath Basin Audubon Society, runs the second weekend of February.