A fight in the sky, a tussle in the water: bald eagle on the mend at Wildlife Care Center
Mark Abraham has rescued injured deer, foxes and numerous types of birds.
But the California Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist had never contended with a bald eagle when he got word of one that was injured at Don Pedro Reservoir on April 9.
A bass fishing guide had spotted the eagle standing on the shore in a cove near some downed trees, Abraham said. The fishing guide met up with Abraham and took him on his bass boat to the eagle’s location.
“It is limping around and it looks like one of its wings is injured,” Abraham said.
Still, the eagle could get a few feet in the air and coast before it went back down.
That’s what it did when Abraham got on the shore and began to approach it; it coasted right into the water.
“There is no great protocol on how you catch an eagle in the water,” he said.
Abraham got back into the boat and “we got close enough so that I could get it into the net. I had about half in the net but it had one wing out. I was kind of off balance in the boat and trying not to step on fishing tackles.”
Abraham chuckled as he recalled how the eagle, “fully extended its (free) wing ... it dug it into the water and it pulled me out of the boat. It felt like someone was digging an ore in; it was a lot more force than I expected.”
Abraham went into the water in full uniform, cell phone in pocket and wearing long leather gloves to protect his arms from talons. “It was pretty funny,” he said.
He climbed back into the boat and on his second attempt got the entire eagle under the net.
He pulled it into the boat, bundled it in a blanket and took it to the Stanislaus Wildlife Care Center in Hughson, where Animal Care Manager Veronica Sandow and founder Donna Burt gave it an examination.
The female bald eagle, with a wing span of six and a half feet, had multiple talon punctures around her abdomen and a particularly bad puncture wound on her right hip, Sandow said. There were several broken feathers on her right wing and at 10 pounds, she was about two pounds underweight.
Sandow said the eagle likely was on the losing end in a fight with another eagle and fell from the sky, breaking the flight feathers. She estimates she was grounded and without food for several days.
But she’s on the mend and Sandow is confident she’ll be released back into the wild in a few months.
While birds molt feathers annually and the eagle’s flight feathers would eventually grow back, Sandow said they will speed up her recovery process by getting donor feathers from a deceased eagle.
Sandow said found deceased bald eagles are sent to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife facility in Colorado for processing. She has put in a request to the agency for the exact feathers from an eagle that matches her size and build.
“They have to match up feather for feather,” Sandow said. “We do what is called imping, where we take the donor feather and attach it to the broken feather shaft. It is a little bit of a painstaking process.”
But once the feathers are attached, the eagle can start building up her muscles in the center’s eagle aviary. She already started gaining weight and her injuries are healing well. Care center staff hope she can be released within about four months.
The Wildlife Care Center helps thousands of injured and sick animals each year and in the spring gets a surge of baby animals to care for.
This weekend, the center is hosting its annual Baby Animal Shower over Zoom. The nonprofit has a list of items the public can donate, an Amazon wish list and information about how to donate on its website at www.stanislauswildlife.org.
This story was originally published May 7, 2021 at 4:00 AM.
