Charming story men track eagle migration

This is a great story! Pictures too.

http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2008/01/07/news/sj2tn20080105-0106stc_bald1_1.ii1.txt

snip

Eighty perched bald eagles simultaneously took flight, filling the sky like a white and brown fireworks explosion.

"I've never seen so many eagles in the air at once," said Meshach, director of animal management for the World Bird Sanctuary in Valley Park. It was the first 2008 flight of Meshach's annual eagle census, a program that tracks the number of northern bald eagles migrating through eastern Missouri and western Illinois.

Every week through February, Meshach and pilot George Stephenson take off from the Spirit of St. Louis Airport in Chesterfield and fly the Skyhawk 700 feet over the Mississippi on a roundtrip from Alton, Ill., to Quincy, Ill.

Meshach counts eagles perched, flying and standing on river ice, jotting the numbers on a clipboard map.Most years, the first flight yields 200-400 eagles. But last Wednesday morning, Meshach and Stephenson counted 994 eagles, the highest first-flight total since Meshach launched the census in 1990."To see this many eagles in early January was amazing," Meshach said. "I was beside myself."