Inland Northwest investors are in for a treat this May when a photo of Washington’s iconic Coeur d’Alene eagle family arrives at a post office near you.
Photographed by Craig Goodwin, the photo titled “Twin Bald Eagles” depicts two eagles (or eagles) poking their gray heads above the cover of their nest as one parent stands proudly behind them. Instead of being on individual postage stamps, the image will decorate the so-called “selvage” of the sheet, or the printed edges around the stamps.
The twins will serve as the background for a set of hand-drawn stamps depicting the different life stages of a native bird.
Although she didn’t know what a stamp selvage was at first, Goodwin, who has lived in Spokane for years and recently moved to Tacoma, was excited to receive an email from the postal company.
He said: “And, as these things go, you never know what’s going to happen. So I held on to it until they finally sent me a check and said, ‘hey, the stamp will be out soon.’
“That was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had.”
In the digital age, Goodwin said the postage stamp is one of the “icons of the media world”.
He said: “There are photographers who used to make very good pictures of permission to live, like the picture of the bald eagle in magazines and all kinds of media. But those opportunities are very limited. So, I think this makes it very meaningful.
Goodwin has been a professional photographer for the past eight years. His twin eagle family series began when he was a hobbyist in 2014. He had just bought a relatively cheap, $1,000 camera lens from eBay and was struggling to shoot a fast-flying osprey in Fernan Lake while using manual focus.
“One of my photography friends said, and he said, ‘Hey, I think there’s this nest with these newly hatched eagles.
The nest was in Lake Coeur d’Alene.
“So I went out and I saw there was a service road going up from this nest that was about 100 feet up in the tree, so I was able to set up my tripod and lens and I wanted to take a look at the nest,” Goodwin recalls.
He sat on his camera for about six hours that day, waiting for the baby birds to relax, which he did when one of their parents returned to the nest. Twin eagles raise chicks as a cooperative pair – each parent trades in guarding the nest while the other hunts.
He said: “I was a guy with a new lens and I was excited to try it out. I didn’t have a business mind about it. It was a lot of fun … and I get a lot of the best photos from just going out and having fun and not agonizing over what to do with the image.”
The United States Postal Service’s stamp website says the bald eagle has been featured on stamps many times since 1969, in both artistic and realistic depictions. The stamp around Goodwin’s selvage features images of eagles in various life stages, art commissioned by David Allen Sibley, an American ornithologist who wrote “The Sibley Guide to Birds.”
Although eagles will typically return to the same nest year after year, the mother eaglet was found dead on the ground under their nest before the end of the season, Goodwin said. The babies were taken in and successfully raised by an Idaho raptor rescue organization, last Goodwin heard, but the nest was abandoned.
“It’s like the last chance to take that place, because there hasn’t been an eagle in that nest since then, as far as I know,” he said.
These days, Goodwin focuses his photography primarily on landscapes, but he has an ongoing goal of photographing every species of hummingbird in North America. With the hard life of traveling to sell paintings near and far, he has been moving up the list, most recently with two models in Phoenix, Arizona.
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