Vermont Fish & Wildlife and Vermont Institute of Natural Science released an adult bald eagle back into the wild Wednesday after 89 days of rehabilitation.
Buzz Ferver, who owns Perfect Circle Farm in Berlin, said he’d seen the eagle regularly at the farm over the past few years, where it would scavenge from his chickens’ scrap pile. One day this summer, Ferver noticed the eagle was trying to hop over the fence to reach the scrap pile, but couldn’t fly.
“He tried like six times and couldn’t get over, and that’s when I knew he was hurt,” Ferver said.
Ferver called the state game warden, who then took the eagle from the farm to Vermont Institute of Natural Science in Quechee.
There, the Center for Wild Bird Rehabilitation performed an exam and X-rays and found the eagle had injured its left shoulder, said Grae O’Toole, the center’s director. They administered some pain medications and wrapped the wing close to the body.
Rehabilitators first kept the eagle in a smaller space to discourage flight, then did exercises to rebuild its strength over time, O’Toole said.
The bald eagle population has rebounded in Vermont over recent years — so much so that earlier this month, the Vermont Endangered Species Committee recommended the Legislature remove the bald eagle from the state’s endangered species list.
A combination of factors led to the bald eagle’s endangerment and subsequent recovery, said Doug Morin, bird project leader at Fish & Wildlife. In the early 20th century, shooting, habitat destruction and the pesticide DDT decimated the state’s eagle population, Morin said. DDT and similar pesticides caused reproductive failure in raptors like bald eagles and peregrine falcons.
But regulators later banned the use of DDT, and Vermont reintroduced several pairs of bald eagles in the early 2000s. One of those pairs reproduced in the wild in 2008, and the population has continued to grow since then.
Morin said the population is now approximately doubling every five years.
“The discrete threat of DDT made the situation a lot simpler than many of our conservation issues are right now,” Morin said. “It made it an achievable thing.”
