Riding the Passport back from the Queen Mary to Pine Ave.
“Aw Man! You got a camera? I wish you had been on my bus earlier,” the bus driver said to me upon seeing the camera slung around my neck.
“Yeah? What did you see?” I asked him.
“An eagle. I swear to God! An eagle was in the road and he had a pigeon.”
“Really? Where?” I asked him.
“Inside the Pike parking structure. Under the bridge as you pass through on the way to the Queen Mary. Sitting right there in the road. The bus scared him and he dropped the pigeon and took off. The pigeon was still alive and he took off the other way!”
“Lucky pigeon,” I told him.
“That’s what I said!” The driver laughed.
“What color was the eagle?” I asked.
“He was…” The driver paused, searching for a point of reference.
“He was his color,” The driver said pointing at the light skinned passenger sitting across from me. “Light brown.”
And then to make sure there was no confusion, “Like that Palm Tree over there…the bottom part of it.”
Both the passenger and I looked over at the Palm Tree and then back at each other. I smiled and to my relief he smiled back.
“At first I thought it was a cat or a dog,” the driver continued apparently ignorant of having committed any transgression by comparing one of his passengers to a piece of vegetation.
“But, nope, it was an eagle! All my passengers saw it. See that pelican? The one on the pole over there? He made him look small!”
The driver continued talking about his eagle, comparing it to different things including a nature show on TV.  As we drove through the Pike parking structure he stopped the bus and pointed at the feathers lying on the asphalt.
“Right there is where he was! An eagle! Big as day!”
As we continued on he said, “You wouldn’t expect to see an eagle around here. Hawks? Sure! But, not an eagle.”
“The birds have been acting weird, though.” He said
“How so?” I asked.
“Two of them–crows–flew into my windshield last week.”
“They die?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. And then, in a quiet reflective tone, “But I sure don’t like pigeons.”
“A lot of people don’t,” I assured him.

Tags: birdwatching, eagles, Long Beach, rarae aves