This weekend we drove up the river a little way to Pere Marquette State Park. During the winter Bald Eagles will fly down from Canada (or other points north) and winter here (a little north of St. Louis) along the Mississippi River. Here we are along the river where we spotted our first several bald eagles. Matthew and Anna wanted to peek at the big river - there was lots of ice in it. Brrr!! But the air temperature was in the mid-60s. Very nice! That's some smokestack behind the kids across the river.
We saw quite a few bald eagles and at first I tried to take pictures of them. But they were just so hard to photograph. Here is one attempt. That black dot in the upper left is a bald eagle. He/she was much lower when I started attempting to take a picture. So this is a terrible picture. And I decided to give up taking pictures and just enjoy seeing them in person. We saw a lot of them - it was very cool.
Pere Marquette had a pretty cool little visitor center too. They had lots of little displays and a few movies. Here are the kids in a giant eagle nest (an aerie?).
It was a nice day but still very wintery looking.
Here's a selfie of Emma and I, and Scott in the background.
The hike was only half a mile or so and pretty mild, but we ran into quite a bit of unavoidable mud. Luckily it wasn't that deep. So everyone got a little muddy except Emma, who thought the whole thing was wonderful. She smiled and cooed for most of the hike. You can see Scott was carrying her at the end 'cause I was carrying a muddy John most of the way back down the hill. Matthew didn't mind being muddy but the other kids did. These are the same kids that love making mud pits in the yard and playing in them. So I don't know, but we still had fun. Matthew and Anna were leading the hike. At the end Matthew hid his walking stick in a special place in case we came back. I was so happy we had a warm day and could get outside!!
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