My wife got word they were releasing an eagle in a local park by the river next to the Bluestone dam in Hinton this afternoon so we went down to watch and let her take pictures of the event. She already has lots of eagle pictures as we see them almost every time we go fishing on the lake here. Two young men found the sick eagle which was a female about 2 years old. Evidently she had lead poisoning from eating gut piles. Not sure if that was from deer or fish on the lake. Anyway the local Avian club nursed her back to health and decided she was healthy enough to make it on her own now. The young men were allowed to remove the blanket covered flight kennel top for her to fly. There must have been a couple hundred people there to watch and take pictures.
Promptly at 3:30 pm the eagle was freed and she immediately jumped up and took flight across the river into the wind. She was flying low and just before she reached the other side she landed in the water. She floated downstream a while then took flight to the shore and the last we saw of her she was preening and cleaning the water off her feathers.
The Avian club rep said she could mate and raise a clutch as early as next year. The baby eagles have hatched around here and are in the nests right now for a few more weeks. This bird still looks like a big hawk and does not have the distinctive white head and tail. It will take her 2-3 more years to obtain those features.
Let's all keep our fingers crossed she is strong enough to make it okay.
Great, We see them behind the house on the North Platte river nearly every day. Will they mate before they get the white features?
Reedco,
Apparently they will raise a couple of hatchings before they get the white head and tail we think of as fully mature. I did not know that before today.
That's neat. It's hard to pick my nose with my fingers crossed though
When you wrote that she hit the water, I was afraid of a bad ending. Glad it turned out to be a good ending!
They are an impressive bird. When I take stuff to the landfill in Augusta there are always at least half dozen around and better than a dozen during winter. If there aren't many people around they don't fly off, I was within 25 feet of a mature one a bit ago, it just stared at me. They are some big up close.
Just starting see them around here. Getting common now. Use to see one a year.
They get white as they get older. Kinda like us. ;D
The Bald Eagles are quite common now in this area! 8)
Love to see them, reminds me of when I was stationed in Alaska!
Chuck,
We love to watch them on the lake. Wife has good lenses and good camera and often we get pictures of the young ones so clear she can read the numbers on the bands. They tag a pretty high percentage of them here every year. At the release we met a man from the next county said a pair is nesting in his back yard and invited my wife and other camera club lady to come photograph them off his back porch. The little ones should be hatched and in the nest now around here. (I offered him free slabwood for his OWB as a thank you gesture.)
We commonly see more on a days outing here than we did on our 2 week outing in Alaska a couple years ago. My BIL lives there in Anchorage and works all over the state with FAA and says they are not all that popular with many of the residents there who consider them a nuisance. We still love them here. I scared an injured duck out of the willows while fishing a couple years ago and it ran across the top of the water never flying over a foot or so off the water and a young and inexperienced eagle took off after him. The last I saw they were both about a foot off the water going around the bend with the duck running and flying. I don't know if the eagle caught him or not. A more experienced eagle would have been more discrete and just bushwhacked him before ducky knew he was around. I love to watch young animals learning life lessons.