The Conowingo Dam crosses the Susquehanna River about ten miles upstream from the Chesapeake Bay, in Cecil County, Maryland. The dam is 4,648 feet long, holds back roughly fourteen miles of reservoir, and was completed by the Philadelphia Electric Company in 1928.
Below the dam, on the eastern bank, Fisherman's Park is a paved lot with a handful of picnic tables, a portable toilet, and an unobstructed view of the spillway and the water that turbines through it.
On the first Saturday in November, at 7:14 a.m., the parking lot held forty-six vehicles. Most were sport-utility vehicles with telephoto lenses on tripods set up beside the open tailgates. The temperature was thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.
The bald eagles arrive at Conowingo in October and stay through January. The dam concentrates them because stunned and injured fish, mostly American shad and gizzard shad, pass through the turbines and become easy prey in the tailrace below.
An informal census by photographer Mark Hendershot, who has worked the dam since 2010, suggested 83 individual eagles in the air or on the rocks during the count window between 7:30 and 9:00 a.m. that morning.
Hendershot maintains a tally on a clipboard kept in the back of his truck. He counts adult-plumaged birds, sub-adults by year class, and any unusual juvenile patterning that allows individual tracking across mornings.
By 8:00 the river had filled with overcast light and the eagles had begun to work. A sub-adult, fourth-year by tail pattern, dropped from a sycamore on the western bank and snatched a shad from the rolling water below the spillway. The bird carried the fish to a low boulder and ate it in roughly seven minutes.
The shutter sound from the parking lot was steady and not loud. Photographers here have an etiquette, refined over years, that includes not shouting when a bird stoops, not blocking another tripod, and not running the access road in winter conditions.
Marius Doyle, on a New England trip that had taken him to Hawk Mountain three weeks earlier, drove down from Wilmington with a friend at 5:45 a.m. They arrived to find the photographers already established and politely made themselves small at the western end of the lot.
Bald eagles were federally listed as endangered in 1978 under what was then the new Endangered Species Act. The species was downlisted to threatened in 1995 and delisted entirely in 2007. The recovery is broadly attributed to the 1972 banning of DDT in the United States.
What the modern bird-watcher sees at Conowingo would have been unimaginable to the bird-watcher of 1975. Pennsylvania's nesting eagle population in 1980 stood at three pairs statewide. The 2024 state survey recorded over 350 active nests in Pennsylvania, with comparable growth in Maryland.
A peregrine falcon, a different and much smaller raptor with its own draw at the dam, made two passes from the catwalk above the spillway at 8:23 and 8:31. The bird, an adult female by size, hunted gulls without success and disappeared upstream.
Conowingo also draws great black-backed and herring gulls in the high hundreds during winter, double-crested cormorants on the rocks below the spillway, and small numbers of common goldeneye, hooded merganser, and bufflehead in the slack water along the eastern bank.
The bald eagles, however, are the reason most people come. Hendershot estimated that 80% of November weekend visitors at the park are present specifically for the species. The remaining 20% are anglers, walkers, and a slowly growing group of waterfowl observers.
At 8:47 a third-year sub-adult was driven off a fish by an adult, which then lost the fish to a herring gull in mid-air. The exchange lasted under five seconds and produced perhaps fifty exposures from the tripod line.
By 9:30 the morning's peak activity had passed. The eagles had stationed themselves in the riverside trees in roughly the same configuration that satellite photos of the dam show, year after year, in winter overhead imagery.
Hendershot packed up at 10:14. He was driving back to Lancaster County and had a granddaughter's piano recital at 3:00. The clipboard count went into the truck's center console, where he keeps the running ledger for the season.
His season totals, kept since 2010, show a slow rise in November-counted eagle numbers from forty-three birds in 2011 to a peak of 124 in 2022. The 2025 season produced a winter average of seventy-one birds per weekend morning.
The numbers track the broader regional eagle population recovery but also reflect the variable winter run of shad. Years with weak shad runs produce fewer eagle-days at the dam. Years with strong runs produce more.
By 11:00 the parking lot had thinned to a dozen vehicles. The river continued to run through the turbines. An adult bald eagle, perhaps the same fourth-year bird from the morning, sat on a sycamore branch eighty feet up and did not move for the next forty minutes.
Most photographers, asked why they return to Conowingo, give the same answer. The bird is large. The light is workable. The species, in this number, was unimaginable thirty years ago. The point of standing in the lot is to keep being there for the thing one was not supposed to live to see.
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