The Eagles Have Landed ...

               “The Eagle has landed.”

                   ~ Neil Armstrong

                        ~ 1930-2012

At 4:18 p.m. on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong’s voice crackled from the speakers at NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, Texas. He said simply, “The Eagle has landed.” With those words, the dream President John F. Kennedy voiced in 1961 – putting a man on the Moon by the end of the decade – had at last come true. Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, was the first man to walk on the moon.

It was wonderful to photograph a majestic American Bald Eagle and Juvenile Bald Eagle after they landed on a high perch above the Little Lehigh Creek on an early October evening at Lehigh Parkway, Allentown, Pennsylvania.

The bald eagle is both the national bird and national animal of the United States.

The bald eagle appears on our nation’s seal. In the late 20^th century it was on the brink of extirpation in the contiguous United States. Populations have since recovered and the species was removed from the U.S. government’s list of endangered species on July 12, 1995 and transferred to the list of threatened species. It was removed from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife in the lower 48 states on June 28, 2007.

Background texture by Jai Johnson added for artistic effect.

Shoot The Moon ...

“The summer days are gone too soon

You shoot the moon

And miss completely

And now you’re left to face the gloom

The empty room that once smelled sweetly

Of all the flowers you plucked if only

You knew the reason

Why you had to each be lonely

Was it just the season?

Now the fall is here again

You can’t begin to give in

It’s all over

When the snows come rolling through

You’re rolling too with some new lover

Will you think of times you’ve told me

That you knew the reason

Why we had to each be lonely

It was just the season”

   ~ “Shoot The Moon”

  ~ written by Jesse Harris

 ~recorded by Norah Jones

            ~ 2002

~ The track was part of “Come Away With Me,” Jones’ first full-length album that received Grammy Awards for Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album, and reached the top of the Billboard 200 chart and several jazz charts.

The moon rises over the Kittatinny Ridge on a warm and beautiful last full weekend of summer, my most favorite of seasons, on a September evening along the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor (D&L Trail) at Lehigh Gap.

Yes, the summer days are gone too soon!

In the shadow of the Kittatinny Ridge, also called Blue Mountain, the Lehigh Gap in Slatington, Pennsylvania, is a crossroads where the Lehigh Gap Nature Center’s trails connect two historic trails – the Appalachian Trail and the Delaware and the D&L Trail.

The Appalachian Trail, a foot path, follows the ridge on both sides of the Lehigh Gap, running 1,245 miles south to Georgia and 930 miles north to Maine. Running from Wilkes-Barre to Bristol, the D&L Trail passes through the Lehigh and Delaware rivers and their canals in Pennsylvania.