BANNER LAKES STATE WILDLIFE AREA — They came out in search of proof for the claim that “it gets better.”
They found it as a once-crippled bald eagle burst from her plastic carrier like a champagne cork and soared 500 feet to circle gracefully over the heads of the wildlife officers and volunteers who saved her.
It gets better than wading through a blood-stained ice and January slush toward cattails covered in more blood, to gather in a flailing, freezing eagle with a massively injured wing.
It gets better than staring at an X-ray showing a half-inch metal ball bearing lodged in the eagle’s elbow.
It gets better than realizing some fool shot the enormous eagle on purpose in Northglenn, with that metal ball and a slingshot.
It gets better than hearing rumors the eagle died after the operating table, and having to call around to tell people, no, it’s just a little hope, but there’s still hope.
And when it gets better, it really hits. There she is, just a few months after being gently carried off Northglenn’s Croke Reservoir, gliding in ever-widening circles south toward the fish and prairie dogs of Banner Lakes, southwest of Keenesburg.
“It’s amazing. She was touch and go,” said Adams County park ranger Karen Keeney, watching the eagle’s flight Wednesday with Megan Wells, a Northglenn park ranger. The two of them were the first to don rubber waders that January day after hearing reports from park walkers about a struggling raptor.
“It’s amazing that we carted her into Birds of Prey rehab, and that we were able to cart her out here,” Keeney said. “It’s so beautiful that we could be full circle here,” Wells said.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife and U.S. Fish and Wildlife still are investigating the shooting and asking for any tips people might have about the attack on an endangered and highly protected national symbol.
“I was really shocked and disheartened when I saw the X-ray,” said Heidi Bucknam, the bird rescue’s executive director. “It’s really frustrating someone would do it.”
The rehab center admits 600 birds a year, about 20 of them eagles, but rarely has one been intentionally shot, and almost never in the smash of a ball bearing. “Her chances were not very good.”
But she made it through the ball bearing removal and the immobilization, then quickly started moving and eating again in the 100-foot enclosed run at the bird center. “We are confident she can hunt,” Bucknam said.
Rescuers and wildlife officials settled on Banner Lakes as a release spot, since there are no other nesting eagles nearby that might get territorial and add to the injured eagle’s recovery challenges. She’s not tagged, so whatever happens to her next is truly free, for the iconic symbol of individual freedom.
Bucknam has been helping rescued birds for 37 years. “This is what I worked towards,” she said, at the top of the meadow where the eagle was about to rewild. “She’s a miracle, that she made it.”
CPW district wildlife manager Philip Sorensen had joined Northglenn rangers in the slush in January to triage the wounded bird. On Wednesday, he was the one opening the cage door and tapping gently on the sides to launch the bird’s next unlikely chapter.
“Any time you get to deal with a large raptor, it’s a cool day,” Sorensen said, watching the circling eagle a quarter-mile away.
“It’s the people’s bird. It’s America’s bird.”
