Early on Saturday morning, Kari Johnson, who lives on North Sawmill road in Haines, heard a ruckus outside her home. 

Johnson: “It almost sounded like a little scuffle right outside our door, and my husband went outside, and we looked around and we saw that eagle laying on the ground.”

Johnson’s dogs ran out to assess the scene, and ran back inside. Johnson noticed the eagle had an injured wing, and contacted the Alaska Bald Eagle Foundation. 

Maia Edwards is the foundation’s science director. She rushed to the scene as soon as she got the message. She says the bird’s wing was broken, and he was in pain. 

Edwards: “So with the help of my interns, we secured the bird and we got it into a kennel, and back to our clinic here. And we righted the wing, put it back in the correct position, and then we tried to fashion a temporary splint for the wing just to keep it in place.”

Edwards says the eagle, a male, most likely got into a fight over territory. 

Because the foundation does not currently have a rehabilitation license, the team took the kennel to the airport and put the bird on an afternoon flight to Sitka, where the staff of the Alaska Raptor Center picked him up.

Shortly after coming back from the airport, one of the interns found a dazed and seemingly stunned red breasted sapsucker, a small woodpecker. It was just outside the organization’s headquarters.

Edwards: “We think it most likely struck one of the windows, or flew into the wall of our facility.”

They put that bird in another box, and offered him a mixture of sugar water and cat food. The bird spent a couple days in a daze, then recovered enough that staff released him.

To cap off the weekend, on Sunday afternoon Edwards received a call from someone on Beach road. The reason? Another eagle on the ground.

Edwards: “An eaglet, a nestling that had fallen out of its nest, right in front of their yard on their property.”

The fluffy eaglet hadn’t developed its feathers yet and was clearly too young to fly.

Edwards: “Either pushed out of the nest by its parents because there were too many other chicks there, or the wind was also really strong that day it might have fallen.”

The team once again sprang into action. They examined the bird and found no injury. They again contacted the Raptor center in Sitka, and again headed to the airport. 

Edwards: “It was pretty funny seeing their reaction when we walked in there a second time, this time with a baby eagle. And they put it on the plane like you would a dog or a cat, and they take it over to Sitka.”

It was a busy weekend at the Alaska Raptor Center in Sitka. Jennifer Cedarleaf is the avian director there. She received both eagles from Haines. But not just there. 

Cedarleaf: “I’ve gotten birds from Petersburg, and Angoon, and calls from Juneau, and Haines, everywhere. Just this weekend, Alaska Seaplanes has been very busy.”

Cedarleaf says the first eagle, the adult male, didn’t make it. 

Cedarleaf: “It had a broken humerus in its wing, which is something that is normally pretty repairable for us on a bird.”

But the bird also had torn  a ligament, and the wound looked bad.

Cedarleaf: “We just didn’t feel like it was going to have a good outcome.”

Cedarleaf says they decided to euthanize the bird. But the outlook for the other bird is much brighter. Cedarleaf put up the eaglet with another -smaller- nestling that had recently come from Gustavus. The pair is getting along well. 

Cedarleaf: “So we put them in the nest together, and the one that we got from Haines is often wandering around and walking around, so it is very entertaining for the other baby eagle to watch.”

Cedarleaf says she expects to release both eaglets in the spring, when there will be lots of herring to feed on.