Thank you Pingflood:-).
Also if I may add to Pingflood's suggestions. There are many big time shooters around these eagles right now and I'm listening to all their tips. The biggest one for me has been to shoot manual. We're shooting a lot of times in cloudy, today it was snowy, grey, days. On top of that the eagles are really feisty at first light and when the light is fading in the afternoon. This means high ISOs and wide apertures in order to get the highest shutter speeds. But the thing about a cloudy grey day is that once you find the right exposure to get the white of the eagle's head and tail right on the edge of blowing out but not blowing out so that you have the max exposure for his dark body you can stick with this exposure for a long time. A guy was saying today that when he got the exposure right for a bright part of the water it wasn't right for a darker part of the water. I told him we aren't taking pictures of the water we're taking pics of the eagles:-). This is why the last pic I posted is high key, the sky is totally blown but I wasn't taking a picture of the sky, I was taking a picture of the eagle and in order to properly expose him, the sky had to go. His head and tail aren't blown and we can see detail in his body and wings, end of story. Shooting manual has freed me of worrying about exposure once I find it, leaving more time to try to get sharp pics which is very very hard in it's own right. Bright sun, I find, is much harder to properly expose these birds.
Of course these high key images aren't a freebie. Sometimes just getting the head and tail right on the edge tends to wash out contrast in the body, it's a fine line getting detail in the body and washing detail out of it and this is a big issue I'm working through now.
I guess another way to state this is I'm working on the best ways to gain contrast back into the photo in post:-), BUT every once in a while I get a high key photo that is just beautiful practically right out of the camera and I'm trying to figure out if this can be achieved on purpose or if it's a function of some kind of magic light and if so I want to be able to recognize this light and take advantage of it. Right now I believe it's the latter.