For years William “B.J.” Moreau has crept closer and closer to the eagles of Unity Pond.
Twenty years ago, when Moreau started visiting them daily, they would fly off as soon as he arrived. Over a period of years, the stately birds began to accept his presence and even allowed him to watch them tend their offspring. Moreau suspected they recognized the sound of his car. He crept closer.
One day about five years ago, Moreau found himself at the base of a tree staring straight up at an eagle’s underfeathers. That’s when something happened that Moreau knows is hard for some people to believe.
“I stood under that eagle for about 15 minutes,” recalled Moreau recently, sitting in his silver Buick and watching the pond. “It reached over and pulled the longest feather out of its left wing, and dropped it.”
The 16-inch feather twirled down in a slow spiral. Moreau, whose right arm and leg were crippled by a stroke at age 41, lunged up with his left hand and somehow caught it.
Maybe it’s because Moreau is an artist, or that living alone gives him time to reflect, or that Native American blood runs on both sides of his family, but the 68-year-old finds meaning in almost everything he experiences.
“That feather meant to me that I was allowed to go there now,” said Moreau, a slim man with a stubbled face and swirling wrinkles around his eyes. “I assume he was allowing me.” Moreau took the feather home to measure and photograph it, then returned it to beneath the tree where he caught it. It was gone the next day.
In the winter, Moreau’s favorite spot is what’s known by locals as the Pond Cemetery Boat Launch, a pristine setting amid marshlands and Unity Pond. There are usually ice fishermen there, many of whom throw their yellow perch and pickerel catches onto the ice for at least five American bald eagles that live nearby.
Edward Quimby of Unity, who has ice fished the area a few times a week for 20 years, is one of the people who throws some of his catches onto the ice.
“The eagles will swoop right down, snatch it off the ice and keep moving. They’ll come down and fly right by you,” he said Thursday, glancing out at his five ice-fishing traps. “Yesterday there were a whole bunch of fish out here. Today I see they’re all cleaned away.”
Just then, a flag sprang up. “The farthest one out, of course,” said Quimby. “Might be something for the eagles.” But the line on his trap hung straight down and the spool wasn’t moving. He checked the bait, and it was OK. “That’s what they call a hit and run,” he said, resetting the trap.
Dennis Keach, also of Unity, walks Kanokolus Road, which leads to the boat launch, every morning after bringing his wife to work.
“That’s what I was just looking for,” said Keach when asked about the eagles. “I think they’re waiting for more ice fishermen. B.J.’s the expert, though,” he said, using Moreau’s nickname.
Moreau sits at the boat launch or any of a dozen camp roads, his digital camera perched on the dashboard, waiting for an eagle to come close. His eye for them is keen.
“I think that’s probably one there,” he said Thursday morning, pointing at a stand of hardwoods about a mile distant on the opposite shore. “It’s about the right size to be an eagle.”
Another bird flies overhead, a speck of pepper against a sunny blue sky. Moreau shades his eyes and squints. “Yeah, that’s an eagle,” he says after a few seconds.
He started photographing them two years ago. Sometimes, he uses the photos as reference material for his primary love, oil painting. Moreau estimates he has finished nearly 1,000 works in his life. He sold all of them except for several works displayed in his home. Vivid and highly detailed, they reveal the hand of a master. Like the feather, there’s deeper meaning in all of them.
In a corner over the kitchen table is a painting he calls “Feather,” which he started the day he caught the eagle feather. On another wall is “Grounded,” a self-portrait with his crippled right foot connected to the ground by a web of tree roots.
“It’s kind of like the stroke grounded me,” he said.
On the wall behind the easel is “Nobody’s Perfect,” a depiction of the devil headed for heaven and an angel, to hell.
In his early years, Moreau was a guitarist and singer who traveled all over the United States with the likes of Hal Lone Pine and Dick Curless. He once was signed with Capital Records, where his most successful act was a band called Happy Medium. He was involved in the founding of the Down East Country Music Association and in 2009 won the organization’s Pioneer Award.
His days on the stage ended suddenly, with a fender-bender on the streets of Waterville. He hit the car in front of him at a traffic light, traveling no more than 5 miles an hour. His head was turned sharply to the right, and the impact tore muscles and arteries in his neck, causing a massive stroke that slurred his speech and stiffened the right side of his body. In addition to ending his music career, the accident forced him to switch from painting with his right hand to using his left.
Like the dropped eagle feather, Moreau found deeper meaning.
“I think the stroke was telling me I shouldn’t be playing music anymore and that I should be painting,” he said. “I wouldn’t change one moment of my life, other than some people dying. My life has been fantastic.”
Asked what brings him to the eagles of Unity Pond every day, sometimes twice, Moreau was quick with an answer, though not necessarily an explanation.
“I come here because I have to come here,” he said. “I like it here whether I see anything or not. It’s as simple as that.”
