West Virginia Bird Center Helps Bald Eagle Fly Again After Injury

Last October, a three-year-old bald eagle hunting prey on a vast farmland near Greenville, Monroe County, allegedly flew into a high wire fence of a game farm, became entangled and struggled to free himself, breaking his wing in the process. .

Game farm workers discovered the injured bird, and West Virginia Natural Resources Police Officer JC Wheeler was briefed on its whereabouts.

After driving to the scene and carefully carrying the eagle to his car, Wheeler drove the injured bird to the Three Rivers Bird Center in Brooks, Summers County, about 25 miles away.

“When I first saw the extent of the eagle’s injuries — broken bone and all that torn tissue — I didn’t know if he would survive,” said Wendy Perrone, chief executive of Three Rivers. Analysis of the bird’s blood sample did not improve this prognosis.

“There was enough lead in his system to make him very sick,” Perrone said.

Although Perrone hoped the eagle’s wing could be saved and enough lead could be removed from its bloodstream so that it no longer threatened its health, she doubted the bird would ever be able to fly again.

But recently at the edge of Bluestone Lake, an eagle dubbed Monroe IV by followers of the Three Rivers Facebook page showed just how far he’s come since October.

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A moment after Wheeler opened the door to his cage, the Monroe IV took off into the sky as a small crowd of onlookers watched and applauded. The eagle flew at low altitude over a section of the lake, then gracefully turned north, disappearing behind a densely forested slope overlooking the shoreline.

“He will have a lot of food here and a lot of friends to hang out with,” Perrone said. “He hasn’t set up the grounds yet, so he’ll have some time to dance around and see where he wants to be.”

Perrone said he was lucky that the eagle was spotted shortly after it was injured on October 23, and that Wheeler took the bird to the Three Rivers Bird Center right away. Also key to the bird’s recovery was a successful two-hour operation two days later at the Good Shepherd Animal Hospital in Charleston, during which veterinarian Sarah Stephenson implanted a pin in the eagle’s broken right wing bone to repair the fracture and stitch the torn tissue together.

After the pin was removed in early December, rehabilitation work began on the ornithological center’s flight shed. By January, the eagle was flying in circles around the closed circular span of the bird center to build muscle strength in the wings.

Meanwhile, the eagle received a series of injections of calcium disodium with EDTA to successfully treat lead poisoning.

An avian rehabilitation center in West Virginia helped a bald eagle regain flight after spending several weeks on the ground.

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“We see so many cases of lead toxicity these days,” Perrone said, especially in predators like hawks and eagles and scavengers like turkey vultures and black vultures.

The accumulation of spent lead munitions in the landscape is considered a major source of lead poisoning. The heavy metal can be ingested by birds feeding on the gut piles of deer and other large game killed by hunters, or the carcasses of wild animals wounded by gunfire, which later die but are not found by hunters.

When a lead bullet hits an animal, it doesn’t just get stuck in one place or go through the body. In many cases, it breaks up into several parts, sometimes numbering in the hundreds. Some of these fragments were found to be more than a foot off the original bullet path.

A 2015 study by wildlife researchers at West Virginia University, Virginia Tech, Michigan State, and the US Forest Service found that lead is permeating the landscape of the eastern United States to a previously unrecognized degree. Bone samples taken from all 106 black vultures and turkey vultures in the study showed lead levels indicative of long-term exposure.

When ingested by a predator, lead affects nerve function and interrupts neurotransmission, causing the bird to lose coordination. In high concentrations, lead can paralyze birds as their muscles are wasted.

“A lot of these birds fly around drunk these days,” Perrone said.

Hunters switching to lead-free ammunition, such as copper bullets and steel shotguns, will greatly reduce lead toxicity in eagles and other birds of prey, Perrone said.

“We removed lead from gasoline and it has had a huge impact on public health,” she said. “Now that the prices of non-lead ammo have come down and become competitive with lead ammo, perhaps more hunters will switch to it.”

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Since the early 1980s, when the first known bald eagle nest in the state was recorded in the remote South Branch Canyon of the Potomac River near the Hardy-Hampshire county line, the state’s eagle population has grown steadily.

In the watersheds of the Greenbrier and New Rivers in southern West Virginia, volunteers have conducted a winter eagle count on one day in January for each of the past 18 years. Volunteers spotted 79 bald eagles during the 2023 survey.

While sightings of eagles were relatively rare 20 years ago, more than 200 pairs of eagles now nest in the state in almost every major waterway.

“You are now in the country of eagles,” said Perrone.