Bald eagles are on display around this Valley lake each winter. We went to find them

Mike Smith stands at the bow of a metal tour boat as it cuts across Millerton Lake.

It’s a clear Sunday morning. The blue skies show white wisps of clouds as a cold chill moves off the water and the sun shimmers off rippling waves.

Smith studies the skyline through a pair of binoculars. He’s looking for birds.

There are water fowl on the lake (egrets and gulls, grebes and coots) and turkey vultures have recently been seen around in large gatherings. But Smith is looking for eagles.

Specifically, he’s looking for bald eagles, which migrate more than 2,000 miles down from the Great Slave Lake in north-central Canada each winter.

“This is what I live for,” says Smith, a docent with the state’s parks department on its annual Millerton Lake Bald Eagle tours.

“During the winter months I love coming out here and being a part of this,” he says.

“I like all birds of prey; I like all birds to tell you the truth. But eagles especially are very special to me. ... The star of this show is the birds that are perched here.”

Eagles’ natural nesting habitat

Smith gets help spotting from the passengers.

They scan the horizon with binoculars of their own, or with large, telephoto lenses attached to digital cameras.

They call out possible sightings as they happen.

The birds, especially juveniles whose heads have yet to molt into that iconic white, can be hard to spot with the naked eye. Even through binoculars, which are lent out as part of the tour, they can appear as mere specks against the brown and gray backdrop of rocks and winter-worn trees.

The nests are easier to spot. The chaotic bundlings are larger than you’d think and stand out as dense dark spots among the branches.

But if you’ve doing this as long as Smith has (he’s been a docent with the state’s parks department for nearly four decades), you have a learned sense of the premium perching spots for the birds.

“They’re teaching me a lot, all the time,” he says.

“They’re the ones crunching the numbers, so to speak.”

The eagles have been coming to the lake for what could be forever, Smith says. The elders of the Dumna tribe of native peoples used to spear-hunt salmon on the lake right alongside the birds.

In the tribe’s mythology, this is holy land, created by the first white-headed bald eagle.

“They are hardwired to come to this location,” Smith says.

The birds still hunt fish. A tour group on Saturday got to see an eagle catch a meal straight off the water.

But mostly, the eagles tend toward small water fowl or, at times, the carcasses of dead animals, Smith says.

Bald eagles at Millerton Lake

The state’s parks department — with Smith at the helm— has been running these weekend sightseeing tours since 1984. Back then, they rented a pontoon boat. It had no roof and no seating. Passengers sat on folding chairs that swayed with the motion of the lake.

The tour is three hours, out and back, during which time Smith shares personal stories; how he first spotted a pair of breeding eagles on in 1995 at Eastman Lake, about 40 miles northwest of Millerton — the same year another pair was spotted farther north in Madera County on the Bass Lake shoreline opposite Ducey’s lodge.

It was the first real sign that the bald eagle population was bouncing back, after the U.S. banned the use of DDT in 1972. The pesticide had been linked to a decline in the birds’ reproduction rate and was one of the reasons they had been on the endangered species list.

“They hadn’t been breeding here,” Smith says.

Millerton Lake didn’t record its first pair of resident bald eagles until 2007, Smith says. He carries with him a laminated picture of the birds, which appeared in The Fresno Bee at the time.

There are now two sets of bald eagles living on the lake year round.

Young eagles spotted on Millerton Lake

It’s about a half-hour into the tour before someone spots the first eagle of the day.

The bird perches on a tree branch and it’s only a silhouette, so it’s hard to determine weather its a bald eagle or a golden. Golden eagles also take up territory on the lake during the winter.

Either way, it’s a good-news bad-news situation.

Yes, the tour got to see an eagle, but it was a juvenile and thus a migrant bird — which Smith knows because Millerton’s resident eagles didn’t record any offspring this year.

Eagles are jealous, territorial birds and and don’t put up with other eagles hanging around their territory.

“That tells me the resident pair is not anywhere near here,” Smith says.

“It would be chased off.”

The resident birds are spotted later, sitting in treetops farther up the lake.

The white plumage of the large male bird is clearly visible even at distance. The passengers jockey around the boat for the best spots to see (and photograph) the bird before it takes flight, disappearing off on the horizon.

“They’re not shy,” Smith says.

In all, six eagles were spotted on the tour: two youngsters (just about a year old) and both of the lake’s resident pairs, which were working on their nests. Eggs will be laid in mid- to late-March, Smith says.

The Millerton Lake Eagle tours continue Saturdays and Sundays through March 9.

This story was originally published February 9, 2025 at 5:30 AM.