Route 17: Weatherman Says A Storm is Coming

There is a peculiar beauty to summer places out of season. Wooden floors are cold in empty bungalows and bunks. Swimming pools are drained down to the aqua paint. Small country shuls are hibernating. In the skies above the Catskills and upper Hudson valley, the bald eagle has returned.

According to the Times Herald-Record -- the wonderful upstate newspaper that does a terrific job covering everything from Satmars in Kiryas Joel to the onion farms and wildlife in the woods along Route 17 - New York State was down to one nesting pair of eagles in 1976.

Wayne Hall writes that the Department of Environmental Conservation just banded two baby eagles in nest 124. A mid-winter survey, conducted from helicopters, found about 200 eagles high above the Hudson and Delaware rivers, above the Mongaup pond and reservoirs, above the empty hotels and camp grounds.

Naturalist Tom Lake, according to the Times Herald Record, saw one wild pair of eagles "shadow each other over the ice with loop-de-loops and wing touches. At the apex of a long arc in the sky they locked talons -- one turned on its back in the air, the other mirrored from above -- and went into free fall for 100 feet before releasing and flaring out over the ice."

You can also see them, we're told, above the railroad, leaving Beacon.

On the ground, or rather on the ice of White Lake, 400 folks recently competed in the Catskill's annual "King of the Ice" winter fishing contest.

Nathan Mayberg, of the Times Herald-Record, tells us the fishermen battled an all-day rain, hail and biting cold, angling for a $500 prize - and ceremonial cape and crown - given for the largest fish. Out of the icy waters, reports Mayberg, came pickerel, walleye, blue gills, perch and trout. The winner, Wayne Quick, arrived at White Lake pre-dawn, drilled a hole in the ice, and at 7:30 a.m. snagged a three-and-a-half pound pickerel.

There are men who live in the mountains and this is what they know: A storm is coming. Snow will be general over hills and hollows. Eagles swoop in cast-iron skies, trout and pickerel swim under the ice, bear and deer share a winter forest, and God is in the quiet.

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