BAYOU METO WMA -- Flapping its muscular wings, a juvenile male bald eagle bid farewell to its rescuer and returned to the wild Saturday at the Wrape Plantation
The flight accentuated the best of the duck hunting community, and the worst.
A duck hunter shot the eagle at Bayou Meto WMA in January. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission cited Garrett P. Davis of Sheridan for illegally taking a raptor. Davis agreed to a fine of $2,500.
Two other duck hunters, Sam McBryde and Robbie Robertson, both of Pine Bluff, rescued the eagle while leaving the WMA. Robertson spotted a large bird sitting on a stump and told McBryde to turn around for a closer look.
"That's when we noticed it was an eagle," McBryde said. "It tried to fly, but it hit the water."
McBryde said he jumped out of the boat to catch the bird, but the water was deeper than he expected and the bird was more of a fighter than he anticipated.
"It was waist-deep water," McBryde said "They can move faster than you think pushing on the water with their wings. I got close enough one time to get ahold of him, but he spun around on me and I figured out real quick we had to do something different."
McBryde took off his hunting coat and managed to grab the bird's wing.
"I told Robbie, 'I'm fixin' to grab him by the neck, and when I do, if all you-know-what breaks loose, wrap him up in my coat.' "
McBryde said the bird greeted him with upturned talons and an open beak eager to shred flesh.
"He wasn't sure If I was someone who was going to help him," McBryde said. "I took his head and pushed him as far up my coat sleeve as I could. When I did that, he just kind of relaxed. His talons were all wrapped up in his wings, so we picked all that apart, and then we folded him up and laid him in the bottom of the boat."
As soon as the pair got to the Long Pond boat ramp, McBryde called Brett Staggs, a retired wildlife officer. Staggs put McBryde in touch with Cpl. Terry McCullough, who took the eagle to Raptor Rehab of Central Arkansas in El Paso.
Rodney Paul is certified to rehabilitate raptors by the Game and Fish Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He said he's rehabilitated 26 eagles in 13 years. He's rehabbed three eagles in 2015, but only this one was injured by a hunter..
Paul said the eagle has a steel pellet permanently lodged in its right ulna, but the projectile did not separate or disjoint the bone. Paul said he kept the eagle in a pen where it could not fly for about 45 days. Then, he moved it to a large enclosure where it could fly for the final two weeks of its captivity. The eagle could not see outside the enclosure and nobody could see inside, so it did not socialize or imprint to people.
"He did not require shots or bandaging, so he required less handling than some birds do," Paul said.
Karen Rowe, the non-game migratory bird coordinator for the Game and Fish Commission, acknowledged there seems to be an uptick in the number of eagle shootings in Arkansas. She attributed it to burgeoning numbers of bald eagles in Arkansas, and to a lack of ethics and lack of respect for wildlife among some hunters.
"You can't fix stupid," Rowe said. "Everyone knows that the sky is blue, and we all know that eagles are protected by law, as are all raptors, and it's against the law to shoot them.
"Unfortunately, with the idiots that do shoot them, I don't think it's an education issue. They [eagles] don't look like any game animal. I think it's that they lack the ethics and the concern and the respect for the species. Heavy fines and heavy penalties of losing your hunting license, I think, is the only way to stop the jerks that think they might be able to get away with something like this."
McCullough was reluctant to comment about how he and his colleagues traced the crime to Davis, except that they conducted a lot of interviews.
"A lot of interviews with anonymous hunters," McCullough said. "One thing led to another."
This case was different, he added, because of its positive outcome.
"Usually that is not the case," McCullough said. "The ending is usually that the bird doesn't make it, plus it's hard to locate the hunter that did it."
Since McBryde rescued the eagle, Paul gave him the honor of releasing it back to its home. McBryde opened the cage and stepped back. The eagle stuck its head into the bright sunshine, kicked itself airborne, banked over a photographer's head and perched in a distant tree.
It spread its wings and stood for many minutes like an engraving on the back of a quarter.
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Sports on 03/08/2015