TURNER – Bald eagle E-70 paused briefly in midair once she was free of biologist Bill Hanson’s grip, her rump thrust out in front of her, waiting for her feathers to catch the breeze.
Two beats of her powerful wings carried her about 20 feet ahead of the waiting group of wildlife biologists and clicking cameras. She landed on the grass in front of them, stopping to look back.
“C’mon, make me proud,” said Charlie Todd, a state biologist.
The eagle turned, jumped and was off, soaring up over Gulf Island Pond to a clump of evergreens on the other side.
Then, in her first act as a newly free eagle, she jumped into the pond and took a bath.
“Well, I was kind of hoping she’d soar way up in the sky,” said Todd. The eagle had spent several months in an enclosure outside Augusta, being nursed back to health by avian specialist Marc Payne.
“She hasn’t had much more than a bathtub since June,” Payne said. “This probably looks pretty good.”
The bird owes her health and freedom to a cooperative effort of the Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Department, Florida Power and Light, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The saga began last June, when Game Warden John MacDonald responded to a report of an injured eagle outside Prospect Hill Golf Course in Auburn. He found the bird, seemingly not injured but unwilling to fly. He chased her for about 400 yards before capturing her.
“She couldn’t fly, but she could still run pretty well,” MacDonald said.
The eagle was taken first to a local veterinarian and then to the Avian Haven, a wild bird rehabilitation center in Freedom. Never named, the bird was called E-70 for the figures printed on the copper-colored band she wears around her left leg.
She was examined, X-rayed and tested, but doctors couldn’t find a reason for her inability to fly.
“We really didn’t think she’d ever fly again,” Payne said. “She just didn’t seem interested until a couple of months ago.”
That’s when she began taking flights around the center’s 100-foot-long wild bird enclosure.
Payne contacted state wildlife officials, who agreed to release her along the Androscoggin River. They suspect that she’s part of a mating pair that nests along Gulf Island Pond.
“That was a historic nest, one we’ve been aware of for a number of years,” said Todd, the state biologist. The nesting eagles have produced several eaglets, but the nest fell apart this summer – just about the time E-70 was captured.
Before her release, she was fitted with a radio transmitter that’s a Matchbox-car-sized metal box weighing about three ounces. It will transmit her location to a satellite every four days for the next four years, allowing biologists to track her and study her movements.
Todd thinks her mate is still in the area.
“Males tend not to like to give up territory where there’s good hunting,” he said. “He’s probably still out there, wondering where she went.”
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