Lake Coeur d'Alene

Higgens Point sits at the eastern tip of this lake, and for a few weeks each winter it is one of the best places in Idaho to stand and watch eagles.

The kokanee in Coeur d'Alene are landlocked sockeye salmon. They spawn on the gravel shallows in late autumn and then die, and the bald eagles worked this out generations ago. From November into February they arrive in their hundreds, perch in the ponderosa pines above the shoreline, and pick the fish off the beaches. The Bureau of Land Management has counted them every winter since 1974, and a strong year runs past four hundred birds.

None of it is especially old. The kokanee were introduced to the lake in 1937 and the eagles found them on their way south. The lake is older, roughly twenty five miles of glacial water carrying a name given by French fur traders, whose phrase for the people already living here translates as heart of the awl.