Hiking in the Smokies

We had another wonderful summer at our vacation home just north of the Minnesota-Canadian border. There seem to be 11 resident bald eagles at our end of the lake, and they have become more and more aggressive in their feeding habits. Whenever my husband cleans fish, the first scavengers to appear are the seagulls that also live on the lake. Their raucous calls apparently alert the eagles that there might be food available, and they begin cruising overhead checking it out. When he's finished cleaning the fish, my husband puts the carcasses out on the rocks at our point. At first, the seagulls flock in to try to eat the carcasses, but after a few minutes, the seagulls fly away, and an eagle or two flies in to grab the carcass. By the end of the summer, they would come in before my husband had even walked away. See photos in "Eagles" album.

There was one crow that was also fairly tame, and I was surprised to see it sharing a dead fish carcass with both an immature and a mature eagle - see photos in album.

I haven't begun hiking yet, after returning from the north woods, but I did see for the first time, in Cocke County, Hearts a'bustin', Euonymus americanus, before the fruit had opened.