Orphaned eaglet recovers at Texas refuge
Bird’s rehabilitation injects hope after senseless killing of its parent
An eaglet orphaned two weeks ago, allegedly at the hands of a Houston teenager with a pellet gun, is being hand-fed at a wildlife refuge in San Antonio and could be released in the fall.
An eaglet orphaned two weeks ago, allegedly at the hands of a Houston teenager with a pellet gun, is being hand-fed at a San Antonio wildlife refuge and could be ready for release by the fall.
To minimize its contact with humans and increase its chance of eventually surviving in the wild, rescuers are using a puppet that resembles the head of an adult bald eagle during feeding while searching for a surrogate eagle to teach the fledgling to fly and hunt. That effort appears to be succeeding so far, said John Karger, founder of Last Chance Forever, a conservancy for birds of prey.
“It’s accepted the puppet pretty well,” Karger said last week. “It’s beginning to stand up.”
He added that the eaglet, believed to be 5 or 6 weeks old when it was found abandoned in a tall tree overlooking White Oak Bayou, is doing well physically. “It was still a little dehydrated and it had some parasites,” he said, “but that’s not unusual.”
The rehabilitation injects a bit of hope into what police and witnesses describe as an otherwise senseless story. On Feb. 21, an eagle considered “a neighborhood pet” was shot out of the sky while dining on fish entrails thrown out by an admiring resident who lives near the bayou in northwestern Harris County.
A 17-year-old was charged with a pair of state misdemeanors: hunting without landowner consent and shooting a species deemed to be threatened in Texas. He faces
a civil restitution penalty that could be more than $10,000. Because of his age, the teen was not charged under federal statutes meant to protect the majestic national symbol.
Dale Jozwiak, who lives in the 9000 block of Vinetree, said the slain eagle had been around for about five years. He said it was the mate of another eagle that continues to fly in the area, to the awe of adults and children alike.
“It’s pretty cool,” said his 12-year-old son, Corbin Jozwiak. “You hardly see any eagles in Houston.”
The elder Jozwiak was still upset last week.
“They just killed it,” he said. “He didn’t just shoot it once. He shot it several times.”
An avid sportsman, Jozwiak often helped feed the family of eagles by tossing the entrails left over after cleaning a fish toward the nearby bayou.
“They’ll just swoop right down and take them,” he said.
That’s what happened on the day the bald eagle was killed. It flew down, grabbed a piece of fish, then perched on a nearby tree.
Jozwiak said he heard a popping sound and assumed someone was shooting turtles nearby. He rushed outside and saw a young man armed with a pellet gun standing over the bald eagle, at that point mortally wounded but still alive.
“He stepped on its neck and shot it several times,” Jozwiak said.
He said the shooter was preparing to take the dead eagle with him but fled when Jozwiak began taking photographs of the carcass and the license plate of the accused man’s pickup.
“Without that” photograph, he said, “it would have been my word against theirs.”
At Last Chance Forever, staffers say the next step is to match the orphaned eaglet with a surrogate eagle and keep human interaction to a minimum. That seems to be working, Karger said.
“It doesn’t seem to want to be around us, and that is exactly what we want,” he said. “We want to get it back into the wild.”
The rehab could take about six months. Karger said the bird would not be released near its former territory in Houston because related eagles might consider it a threat or at least a competitor.
“The bird would be a stranger to them,” he said.
Bald eagles are no longer on the endangered species list, though Karger couldn’t say exactly how many call Texas home. But he said it’s not unusual for some to nest in urban settings.
“As long as nobody harasses them,” he said, “they have a pretty good tolerance of humans.”