Bald eagles on the Skagit River winter
— the cottonwoods full of white heads in January.
Not only on a wall.
“In January the chum salmon carcasses come down the gravel bars of the upper Skagit and the eagles come down out of the Cascades to find them. Most years the count runs five to eight hundred birds wintering between Rockport and Marblemount, one of the largest congregations in the lower forty-eight. From the pullouts along Highway 20, the riverbank opens onto twenty or thirty white heads in a single cottonwood, waiting for the light to come up over the snow. The river runs grey with glacial silt. The eagles wait.
Bald eagles on the Skagit River winter, on ceramic.
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The Skagit River runs about 150 miles from headwaters in British Columbia south and west through the North Cascades to Puget Sound at Mount Vernon. The wintering eagles concentrate along a roughly ten-mile stretch between Rockport and Marblemount in Skagit County, Washington, paralleled by State Route 20, the North Cascades Highway. The Skagit River Bald Eagle Natural Area, established by The Nature Conservancy in 1976, covers about 1,500 acres of riparian forest along the river and its side channels. It is managed jointly by The Nature Conservancy, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the U.S. Forest Service. The closest town is Rockport; the closest interpretive site is Howard Miller Steelhead Park.
The eagle gathering is driven by the chum salmon run. Chum return to the upper Skagit in late October and November, spawn in the gravel side-channels, and die. Their carcasses drift down through December and January, providing easy protein during the hardest weeks of winter. Counts have ranged from about 200 in lean salmon years to over 800 in strong runs, with a long-term winter average of roughly 400 to 500 birds, according to Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife survey data. The river itself runs cold and grey with silt from the Skagit and Sauk drainages. The salmon depend on the gravel; the eagles depend on the salmon.
Eagle counts begin in mid-December, peak in the first two weeks of January, and taper through February. The best viewing hours are seven to eleven in the morning, when eagles leave night roosts to feed on the river bars and often hold in the cottonwoods until the sun reaches them. The Skagit Eagle Festival runs the last two weekends of January in Concrete and Rockport, with guided walks and drift-boat float trips. Roadside viewing is from the pullouts on SR-20 between mileposts 100 and 110. The Skagit River Bald Eagle Interpretive Center in Rockport is open Saturdays and Sundays through the season.