Stamp enthusiasts across the Inland Northwest will be thrilled when a photo of a family of Coeur d’Alene eagles taken by a Washington state photographer arrives at a post office near you this May.
The photo, titled “Twin Bald Eagles,” by Craig Goodwin shows two baby eagles (or eagles) poking their gray, fuzzy heads out from the cover of a nest, with one parent proudly poised behind them. The images are not on individual stamps, but instead decorate the so-called “ears” of the sheet, the printed margins around the stamps.
The twins will serve as the backdrop for a series of hand-drawn stamps depicting different stages of the national bird’s life.
Goodwin, who initially didn’t know what the ears on stamp sheets were, but who had lived in Spokane for years and recently moved to Tacoma, was excited to receive a “random” email from a postal company affiliate.
“And, well, as things like this go, you never know if it’s actually going to work out,” he said. “So I held onto it loosely until finally the check came in and they said, ‘Your stamps will be issued soon.’
“It was one of the best surprises I’ve ever had.”
Goodwin said that in the digital age, stamps are one of the few “iconics of the print media world.”
“There are photographers who were making a living licensing images, including images of bald eagles, to magazines and all kinds of print media,” he says. “But those opportunities have largely dried up, and I think that’s why this opportunity is especially meaningful.”
Goodwin has been a professional photographer for the past eight years. His series about the bald eagle family began in 2014 as a hobby for him. He had just bought a relatively inexpensive $1,000 camera lens on eBay and was having trouble photographing fast-flying ospreys in Lake Fernan while using manual focus.
“One of my photographer buddies mentioned this and said, ‘Hey, I think there’s a nest with newly hatched eagles. Just shut up and don’t tell everyone,'” he said.
The nest was located in Lake Coeur d’Alene.
“So I went out and there was a side road across from this nest that was up in a tree about 100 feet high, so I set up my tripod and lens and was able to just barely peek into the nest,” Goodwin recalled.
That day, he sat in front of the camera for about six hours, waiting for the slightly squishy baby birds to recover. They perked up when one of the parents returned to the nest. Bald eagles raise their young in pairs. Each parent guards the nest while the other hunts.
“I was just a guy with a new lens and was excited to try it out,” he said. “I had no business sense at all. It was just really fun…and I found that a lot of the best photos come from not thinking too much about what you can do with the image and just going out and having fun.”
The bald eagle has appeared on stamps many times since 1969, in both artistic and realistic depictions, according to the U.S. Postal Service’s stamp website. The set of stamps around Goodwin’s ears depicts eagles in various life stages, and the art was commissioned by American ornithologist David Allen Sibley, author of “The Sibley Bird Guide.”
Bald eagles typically return to the same nest every year, but the mother eagle was found dead under the nest before the season ended, Goodwin said. Last Goodwin heard, the babies were picked up by a raptor rescue group in Idaho and raised successfully, but the nest had since been abandoned.
“As far as I know, there hasn’t been a bald eagle in that nest since then, so I feel like it was the last chance to photograph that spot,” he says.
These days, Goodwin focuses his photography on landscapes, but he has an ongoing goal of photographing all species of hummingbirds in North America. With a well-travelled lifestyle selling prints at national and international art shows, he has progressed through the ranks, most recently selling several species in Phoenix, Arizona.
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