Local photographer’s eagle-and-eaglets to be featured on new postage stamp sheet
Inland Northwest philatelists are in for a treat this May as a Washington photographer’s picture of a Coeur d’Alene eagle family makes it to a post office near you.
Taken by Craig Goodwin, the photo titled “Bald Eagle Twins” depicts two baby eagles (or eaglets) poking fuzzy gray heads out from the cover of their nest as one parent postures proudly behind them. Rather than being on individual postage stamps, the image will decorate what is called the “selvage” of the sheet, or the printed margins surrounding the stamps.
The twins will act as a backdrop for a set of hand-drawn stamps depicting the different life stages of the national bird.
Though he didn’t initially know what the selvage of a stamp sheet was, Goodwin, who for years lived in Spokane and recently moved to Tacoma, was excited to receive the “random” email from a postal service affiliate.
“And, well, as these things go, you never know if it actually will turn out,” he said. “So I held onto it loosely until they finally sent me a check and said, ‘hey, the stamp’s coming out soon.’
“That was one of the best surprises I’ve had.”
During the digital age, Goodwin said the postage stamp is one of the few “icons of the print media world.”
“There are photographers who used to make a very good living licensing images, like the bald eagle image to magazines and all kinds of print media,” he said. “But those opportunities have dried up significantly. So that, I guess, makes this one especially meaningful.”
Goodwin has been a professional photographer for the past eight years. His series on the bald eagle family began when he was a hobbyist in 2014. He had just bought a relatively cheap, $1,000 camera lens off eBay and was struggling to shoot the quick flying osprey at Fernan Lake while using manual focus.
“One of my photographer buddies mentioned, and he said, ‘Hey, I think there’s this nest with these newly hatched eaglets. Hush-hush, you know, don’t tell everybody,’ ” he said.
The nest was at Lake Coeur d’Alene.
“So I went out and saw there was a service road that went up across from this nest that was about 100 feet up in a tree, and so I was able to set up my tripod and lens and just kind of barely peek into the nest,” Goodwin recalled.
He sat at his camera for around six hours that day, waiting for the somewhat floppy baby birds to perk up, which they did when one of their parents returned to the nest. Bald eagles raise chicks as a mated pair – each parent trades off guarding the nest while the other hunts.
“I just was a guy with a new lens and was excited to try it out,” he said. “I didn’t have any business sense about it. It was just really fun … and I find a lot of the best photos come from just getting out and having fun and not getting too wound up about what I can do with the image.”
The United States Postal Service stamps website says the bald eagle has been featured on stamps many times since 1969, both in artistic and realistic depictions. The set of stamps Goodwin’s selvage surrounds features drawings of eagles at different life stages, art commissioned from David Allen Sibley, the American ornithologist who authored “The Sibley Guide to Birds.”
While typically bald eagles will return to the same nest year after year, the eaglets’ mother was found dead on the ground under their nest before the end of season, Goodwin said. The babies were taken in and successfully raised by an Idaho raptor rescue organization, last Goodwin heard, but the nest has since been abandoned.
“It’s sort of like that was the last opportunity to photograph that location, because there haven’t been bald eagles in that nest since then, as far as I know,” he said.
These days, Goodwin focuses his photography largely on landscapes, but he does have an ongoing goal to photograph every species of hummingbird in North America. With a travel-heavy lifestyle to sell prints at art shows near and far, he has been making progress on the list, most recently with a couple species in Phoenix, Arizona.