Season’s Greetings!
The cold and snow that has infiltrated the Fox River Valley is a timely reminder that the holiday season is upon us. The holidays also coincide with the season when the Bald Eagles in the area return to their nesting areas to repair and rebuild their nests in preparation for another breeding season. During this time of year, I’m most often in the field checking out the local eagle nests for activity to monitor the ones that will be active for the year. Last year, in early January, I spent a lot of time at the Hinckley nest watching Meghan and Harry do their nest renovations. While watching them, they sometimes came very close to me giving me the opportunity to get some excellent photographs of them collecting branches and grasses and taking them to their nest.
A couple of the photos I took of Meghan and Harry turned out so well that my nephew Mariano Chavez, an accomplished artist in Chicago, asked if he could use them to create cyanotypes of them. The cyanotype “image is printing off a large photo negative on an archival 100% cotton rag watercolor paper. The paper is hand coated with the cyanotype photographic solution then exposed/developed, washed, and dried. The process of developing the work with UV light creates the unique deep indigo color permanently on the paper and also captures high detail. Each cyanotype is an original photo of the work and each is unique due to the hand coating and washing process.”
Mariano and I have since collaborated with each other with him utilizing some of my photos of nature to create beautiful artwork. Some of that art will be on display at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago from mid-January through June, 2026. A couple of those pieces will be the cyanotypes he created out of my photos of Meghan and Harry.
Regular readers of my column here will recognize Meghan and Harry as I have featured them and their eaglets in a number of my columns on the FOTFR blog over the years. Meghan and Harry are well known Bald Eagles in the Big Rock/Little Rock Creek watershed within the greater Fox River watershed. Their successful breeding and rearing of their young has contributed significantly to the reemergence of the Bald Eagle as a commonly seen bird within the Fox River watershed. One of the true environmental success stories both locally and nationwide is the recovery of the Bald Eagle from the Endangered Species list. Due to federal legislation like the Clean Water Act of 1972 and through environmental activism of groups like Friends of the Fox River, the quality of waterways where the Bald Eagle lives has increased greatly enabling the eagles to breed successfully and to begin to repopulate the watershed to historic numbers. Forty years ago, seeing a Bald Eagle over the Fox River was almost unheard of. Today, the Bald Eagle is a common sight in the skies over the length of the Fox River.
To commemorate the holiday season and the beginning of another Bald Eagle breeding season, Mariano and I are donating a cyanotype of Meghan to the Friends of the Fox River to be raffled off as part of a fundraiser to raise funds to allow FOTFR to continue to do great education and restoration work within the Fox River watershed. It’s a fitting tribute to the organization whose work to raise awareness of the resource the Fox River provides, and the restoration work they sponsor and perform that has improved water quality in the river over the years directly helping the Bald Eagle to return from the brink of local extirpation.
of Meghan as she was collecting branches and grasses
with her mate, Harry, near the Hinckley Bald Eagle nest site
in January of 2025.
Look for details on how to participate in the raffle on the Friends of the Fox River website in the coming months.
In the meantime, have a Happy Holiday season and Keep On Fixin’ the Fox!