A Golden Eagle was reported near town, and I was able to go out a couple times to look for it. On the first day, I found a handful of Red-tailed Hawks, some Northern Harriers, and a distant Bald Eagle. As I was walking back to the car, I spotted another eagle coming in low... it was mostly a dark bird, perhaps good for Golden Eagle. I only had time to get a few photos before I lost sight of it. Upon reviewing the photos it was a Golden Eagle! I got such a brief look at it I had to go out again to try to see it. Later that afternoon I went to a nearby location and found only a Bald Eagle.

I returned the following morning and found the Golden Eagle perched in the expected location. This time, I got scope and binocular views of it, and plenty of photos. It flew around for a while and eventually settled back down on the perch again. While not a lifer (I'd seen a distant soaring Golden Eagle in November) I really appreciated getting a much longer look at this bird.

On a side note, I've become less and less impressed by AI denoise (DxO, Topaz, and Adobe Lightroom) over the last few months. I'm not sure if the novelty is wearing off, but now to my eye the overly smooth look of denoised images doesn't look very realistic anymore. I also like to keep my RAW images as well as the denoised DNG, so there's a significant storage requirement when denoising many images. I've found myself doing targeted old fashioned denoise on many images that are "record shots" that are not "keeper" or "portfolio" quality images in the first place.

For some of these Golden Eagle images, and the Greater Yellowlegs images, I experimented with using Lightroom Classic's AI "Enhance" denoise with a very low slider setting. Compared to DxO PureRAW, this does leave some grain in the photo but also seems to preserve more original sharpness and detail in the image while also cleaning it up somewhat. One drawback of this method, over DxO PureRAW, is that it doesn't output a separate denoised DNG file. This saves a litle disk space, but it means that if I ever pause my Adobe subscription I'll not be able to edit the denoised version of the photo. To partially get around this, I output the denoised and cropped (to save space) RAWs as 16-bit TIFF files.

These photos are © 2026 Phil Thompson, all rights reserved.

My "birds in review" collages can be found here.