A Chance Encounter

As the evening photo shoot at Lake Parker began to near to a close, my Dad was photographing an egret on the banks of the lake. About 60 yards away from where he was shooting, was a concrete dock that I had ventured out on to take in the peaceful view of the massive body of water. The air was cool and crisp and there were only a few small waterfowl in sight. There weren’t many humans in sight either, except for Dad and I.

As I stood there, looking out on all the glorious nature in front of me, I began to pray under my breath to God. I was thinking of all that He has been doing in my life and all that He has given me. I began to tell Him of how He was the “Master Creator and Artist”. “The Master Writer of True Stories”, for He has been writing my story and I asked Him to continue to do that. Little did I know that God was about to write something very surprising into the script of this particular evening for Dad and I.

It wasn’t long until my Dad finished photographing the egret and we started the journey back across the park to our vehicle. Not far into our walk, we began to hear a man shouting something. At first, I didn’t think that he could be shouting at us, but then I noticed his hand motions to get our attention. We soon realized that he was saying, “Hey, there’s an eagle over here!” He kept on repeating this and waving his hands like a mad man at us while hiding behind a tree. As we approached (with caution), the man kept on saying, “Do you see it? It’s right over there!” I was beginning to really wonder if this guy, who was around my age, was crazy. We soon noticed a bird on the ground though, behind some trees in front of the lake, about 20 feet from where the man was standing behind his tree. His “eagle”, was actually an “osprey”, as my Dad quickly realized and pointed out.

As we came up on the scene, we readied our camera’s and began shooting this rare sight. The osprey was just sitting on the ground on top of some nesting material. After a couple shots, I moved in about five more feet. Then, I decided to get a different angle and went around the trees to the opposite side of the osprey. At first, I was 15 feet away…then 12...then I laid down on the ground about 7 feet away to get an even better angle of this raptor. My Dad was still firing with his camera on the opposite side of the bird, about 20 feet away. Soon, I carefully got back up from the ground and began to make my way in front of the bird, placing me about 6 feet away from him. Before I could get a shot off though, I saw his massive wings begin to spread open. Upon seeing this…I ran, for fear that I was about to be attacked by an osprey at Lake Parker. As I passed by my Dad, I heard him say, “it’s ok, he’s flying the other way”. With this action, the male osprey was saying, “enough is enough” and took to the skies, leaving his nesting material behind.

My Dad then said, “at least we now know he wasn’t injured”. We thanked the man who had gotten our attention after seeing us with our cameras. He knew that he was probably going to look crazy, but he took that chance anyway. We were glad he did. As we headed back to the car, we knew that we had shared a very special moment that night. Why the osprey sat there so long while we photographed him is beyond us, but it wasn’t long until I remembered what I had said to God moments before that event; He is “The Master Writer of True Stories”.

He wrote a good one for us that night.


…you can see my Dad’s side of this story by visiting his photo blog, “Country Captures“.