Birders

I grew up in CA and had done a lot of camping in the West, Northwest, Rockies, including Canada, but all of the Bald Eagles I had seen were from afar, dozens or hundreds of meters away.

Then one day in my twenties I finally got a close one. I was hiking with a friend at a small reservoir in New England. We had parked at a trailhead and were walking down an access road, the trees were pretty thick and tall on both sides, and the reservoir had just come into view through the gap in the trees caused by the road. It swooped directly over us, having come from behind, maybe 12-15 feet off of the ground, following the road ahead and glided down until it was maybe 5 feet from the ground. Once it got out over the water it banked to the side and we lost sight of it because our field of view was still restricted by the trees. By the time we covered the last 50 meters or so and could look out over the whole reservoir and the trees ringing it, it was nowhere to be seen.