When the gates to the two holding crates were open August 27th, one young eagle exited each holding cell with the haste of sixth graders escaping school at the sound of the day’s final bell.
The two birds – one male and one female – were brother and sister. The siblings were hatched April 7th from a nest found within 100 yards of busy Ohio Route 44 in Lake County’s Grand River Village.
This nest is one of 707 in Ohio and one of seven in Lake County. It is easily seen in early spring before the trees leaf out as motorists travel north on Rt. 44 to the entrance of Headlands Beach State Park. The park is less than one mile from the nest structure.
In June, the two eagles had fallen from that nest, one tumbling to the ground and another one that was watched over about 17 days, dropping from one branch to the next lower branch. The visuals were obtained by a crew of volunteer hawk-eyed eagle-nest observers.
Volunteers have been observing the nest for 11 years, a structure that has pulled off about 20 eaglets.
When the team scooped up the first eagle that tumbled to the ground the members discovered a third eaglet had also fallen. However, that third eagle was dead and its carcass was being feasted upon by predators.
The trio’s parents were nearby but were largely helpless to defend and feed the other two still-living eaglets, crew members said.
This is where Lake Metroparks comes in. The agency began rehabilitating the initial eaglet in early June when the bird was brought to the agency’s Kevin P. Clinton Wildlife Center in Kirtland. The second eaglet was turned over the wildlife center a couple of weeks later, said Tammy O’Neil, the station’s wildlife care manager.
Intended was to bolster the two birds’ weight, immune systems and meet their other needs. Once back in good health the ultimate goal was always to release the birds as close to the place where the eaglets were found. Such is a situation in which O’Neil’s staff has a lot of experience with, too, having received its first eagle for rehabilitating in 1997.
“Over the past five years alone we’ve managed to rehabilitate 18 eagles,” O’Neil says.
“The first bird we began caring for was the female. The second bird, the male, the volunteers observed was getting weaker and weaker. When we began caring for this bird you could feel its breastbone,” O’Neil said.
Eagle nest observer Harvey Webster added the male “had left the nest a lot earlier than it should have.”
“And it had some blood issues as well,” said Webster, who also is a now retired naturalist and eagle authority with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
To bring the birds back to recovered health the center’s staff – which consists of professional wildlife care specialists and volunteers - would take turns hand-feeding the eagles four times daily. The birds were anemic as well, O’Neil-Gayer said.
“We started with supplemental food and later gave them meat and fish,” O’Neil said.
While at the wildlife center the eagles were isolated in a separate large, flight cage. Minimal human interaction was insisted upon. This, because the intention was always to release the two eagle together as quickly, safely, and practically as possible, O’Neil said.
O’Neil said the only logical place to release the eagles when the time came was where the nest is located: the 850-acre Mentor Marsh State Nature Preserve.
Picking a release site along the Marsh’s two-mile long Zimmerman Trail, a crew consisting of O’Neil, Webster, nest watcher Nan Patrick and several other volunteers used a hand cart to truck the two crates holding the pair of eagles.
The site selected was along the northwestern hem of the swampy portion of the marsh where it edges the preserve’s hardwoods uplands. Almost across the expanse from the nest where the two birds were hatched, in fact.
O’Neil advised caution that once the crates’ doors were unlatched the birds would blitz, free to resume their lives in the wild.
The wildlife care manager hit the warning right on the head. With hardly any time to even focus a camera on the birds’ escape, the eagles burst forth and rapidly beat their wings; the birds headed in the direction of the nest where they originally came from.
O’Neil could not have been more proud. It was another mission accomplished for the wildlife center with two more eagles added to Ohio’s growing population of the nation’s symbol.
- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net
JFrischk4@gmail.com
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