Chapter 2

Lords of the Wind and Air

Diurnal raptors are winged predators who hunt by day. They are at the top of the avian food chain, swift and deadly in their flight, and probably least understood and most maligned of all birds. Native and ancient peoples revered them for their power, speed, beauty, and deadliness. In Nova Scotia, their numbers include eagles, hawks, falcons, and osprey.

Marlene

The eagle did not hesitate. She lunged out of the release box, straight upward without touching the ground, spreading wide her newly healed wings to pulse into the air and rise quickly on a field-edge updraft. For a long while, she hung there, soaring high above an Antigonish County field and the group of people on the road below.

One was a Hope for Wildlife worker who had helped her recover. Another was the university professor who had found the injured eagle and called for help. The person with the camera on her shoulder was a documentary filmmaker who had been shooting video of the eagle for five months. Still others were area adults and children, all come on an October day to see her take the freedom she had lost the previous May.

St. Francis Xavier University’s Riley Olstead had been there when the story began and was there again for its end. Olstead was certain the big female bald eagle called Marlene knew she was home.

“She must have ridden that updraft for forty minutes,” Olstead said. “She was just circling, checking everything out. I like to think that she was just checking to see if any of the furniture had been moved.”

 It had been a May morning, cool but full of promise, when Olstead and Marlene first met. Professor Olstead slipped out of her home on the outskirts of Antigonish about 6:30 for her daily run. She and her family had been in Nova Scotia less than a year after moving from Toronto, but her original home had been British Columbia, and experience there, although she didn’t know it yet, was about to save an eagle’s life.

“It was a crisp early morning. No sign of weather, just a nice quiet rural day in Nova Scotia,” Olstead said. “I was on the North Lakeville Road, about twenty minutes into my run, when I noticed this enormous bird standing in the middle of a field.”

While someone else might have taken it as just another rural sight, instinct from Olstead’s youth told her something was very wrong with this picture.

“I’m from BC and I’m quite familiar with bald eagles. This looked very strange, that there would be a bird sitting that long in a field as I approached it. As I was coming up along the road, it didn’t move at all,” Olstead explained. “This was very, very strange.”

Olstead decided to find out what was going on. Could the bird move or not? Was there something on the ground so important that the eagle refused to leave it, even when a human approached? As she drew closer, the eagle remained motionless. Then she got her answer.

“All of a sudden, it pushed off and started doing these magnificent leaps into the air, bounding away,” she related. “It was then that I saw her attempt to put out her wingspan. It was very clear that one wing was injured, probably broken.”

Olstead knew the eagle wanted to take off, but could not. It was a huge, beautiful bird, she noted, but without flight would last only as long as it took another predator to find her. To make things worse, Olstead had no idea how to get help. New to the province, she was under the impression there were no resources available in rural Nova Scotia to aid one injured bird flopping about in a field. She sprinted for home, hoping her husband would have a solution. Olstead was very worried that one predator in particular would be onto the injured eagle in no time.

A flight cage was essential when Hope for Wildlife began taking care of Nova Scotia’s birds of prey after the Atlantic Raptor Centre closed. Volunteers moved this one from the old centre to Seaforth.

“I was aware of the fact that the bird was leaving a trail of downy under feathers, and that this would be picked up. Other animals would quickly become very interested, and we’re pretty rich around here with coyotes,” she explained.

With a very real concern that the eagle would not last long in coyote country, she burst into the house and awakened her family. Her husband, Hugh Benevides, is an environmental lawyer and he knew of Bob Bancroft, although they’d never met. However, he soon located the well-known Nova Scotian broadcaster, writer, and retired wildlife biologist and dragged him into the early morning emergency. Bancroft provided the phone number for Mark Pulsifer, regional biologist for the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources and one more St. FX co-worker Olstead had yet to meet. Within twenty minutes, Pulsifer was on the scene. Olstead was skeptical when she saw Pulsifer had a small portable dog kennel with him. Unaware of his years of experience, she voiced her concern that he did not understand the size of the bird involved, and got a chuckle in reply from the wildlife veteran.

Did You Know?

• The word bald comes from the Old English balde, meaning white.
• An eagle’s eyesight is seven times better than a human’s. It can see clearly for up to one and a half kilometres.
• The beak of a bald eagle is made of keratin, the same substance as human nails.
• It takes five years for a bald eagle to mature. Only adult birds have white heads and tails.
• Eagles mate for life.
• After the DDT crisis of the 1950s wiped out most of America’s eagles, Nova Scotian birds were used for restocking several states.

By this time, the weather had changed and there was a steady rain as the pair tracked the feather trail across the field and into alder-thick woods. Olstead stopped at the edge of a thicket, but Pulsifer waded in, vanished, and in a short while reappeared with the bird. She was in a capture net, her talons clamped on the bar.

In the next few moments, Olstead came to realize that Pulsifer more than knew what he was doing and also received a few tips from him on handling a wild eagle. A raptor cannot be forced to release its talons once they clamp down and lock, Pulsifer told her. Instead, you make it want to let go. This Pulsifer did by throwing the net, with the eagle attached, into the air. The bird released its talons to attempt flight and was caught when it fell. Olstead noticed Pulsifer had pinned the eagle’s talons with one hand and had his other on its chest. Once again, she expressed concern, this time that he was putting his hand in danger from the eagle’s powerful beak. Pulsifer said not to worry. With birds of prey, it is the talons that are most dangerous, he explained. The beaks are for feeding and rarely used aggressively. Eagles are rippers, not peckers, Pulsifer said. On the other hand, if he had been holding a raven, he would never put his hand there.

As Pulsifer tucked the squawking eagle into the portable dog kennel, the container’s size finally made sense to Olstead. She realized this transport cage wasn’t there to make the bird comfortable; its purpose was to limit the eagle’s movement so it couldn’t further hurt itself. The cage would need to do that job very well. Pulsifer was facing a drive of several hours to Seaforth and the Hope for Wildlife centre, a place where this injured eagle would have a chance to stay alive.

Dr. Barry MacEachern of the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital was used to seeing animals Hope Swinimer and her Hope for Wildlife team were trying to save. He had spent countless hours at his Tacoma Drive workplace putting to use both proven medical practice and unique experimentation to save and rebuild the lives of shattered wildlife, and his work did not stop when the animals left his hospital. Year after year, he regularly made the long journey down the Eastern Shore to Hope’s site to check on his patients. He took no payment for his work. All this was done as a volunteer, because he believed in Hope for Wildlife’s cause.

MacEachern’s impact on injured wild creatures was vital to Hope for Wildlife, but he also did something else that had value, and certainly staying power. Whenever he worked on an animal, he gave it a name. A barred owl hit by a winter salt truck became Salty, a great horned owl delivered full of porcupine quills on Christmas Eve was naturally Eve. When a speeding car’s tire crushed a pregnant wood turtle, what name would be suitable for her but Dunlop?

“I usually try to name the animals with something I will remember, to jog my memory as to either the nature of the injury or when they arrived,” said MacEachern.

The new eagle from Antigonish came two days before Mother’s Day. He called her Marlene, after his mother, so in the future he would remember when he first worked on her. Everyone who dealt with the bird began using the name MacEachern had tagged her with.

Riley Olstead’s initial reaction that morning in an Antigonish field proved correct. Dr. MacEachern found an open fracture of the ulna, the main bone in Marlene’s left wing, and it was quickly decided that if she was to have any chance of recovery the bone needed to be pinned. Even then, there was no guarantee she would fly again. An eagle’s wing carries tremendous stress during flight, more per square centimetre than a large aircraft, and anything except a perfect knit would not withstand that stress.

MacEachern decided to perform a procedure called retrograde pinning. A stainless steel rod is inserted to join the two broken bone parts, and the wing is then immobilized so the pin can hold the bone in the correct position to grow together again. If the bone knitted, and everything else healed properly, the pin could be removed in about eight weeks.

The following day, Marlene was put under anaesthetic for the surgery, but an unexpected, possibly fatal, complication was discovered. Infection had worked its way into the open wound and was well established. Operating on a badly infected wound is always risky, but with a bird, problems are potentially greater. Mammals can be shaved to keep the area around the wound clean. Birds, however, have feathers, not fur. They cannot be shaved, which always presents a danger of re-infection. A quick decision was made to complete the surgery despite the new problem, and the pin was put in place, the wound closed. Loaded with antibiotics and anti-inflammatory pain control, the eagle was taken back to Hope for Wildlife to recuperate.

While Marlene was unconscious at the Dartmouth Veterinary Hospital, someone new entered her life. Shannon MacDougall was a University of Kings College journalism graduate who worked for Arcadia Entertainment in Halifax. Her company was preparing a television series on the work of Hope for Wildlife, and she joined the field unit just in time to shoot her first surgery—Marlene’s. MacDougall remembered one moment that day as a life-lasting image. After it, her camera followed Marlene through all five months of recovery.

“The most vulnerable I ever saw her was in the arms of Dr. Barry as she came out from under anaesthetic at the vet hospital,” she said. “He held her head in his hands and cradled her against his chest. It’s something you won’t often see, that’s for sure.”

Over the next few months, Marlene’s wing slowly healed, and MacDougall was there, constantly filming. As she gradually grew familiar with Seaforth’s wild guests, MacDougall came to realize each species had a signature trait. There was the comic playfulness of a young raccoon, the shy beauty of a fox kit, and the regal aloofness and desire for freedom of the hawks and eagles.

Dr. Barry MacEachern tending to a pelican, just one of the many different types of birds that make their way to Hope for Wildlife.

“Birds of prey are fascinating in that they never ever, no matter how cared for and tended to, form any attachment to their human caretakers. They remain skittish and sort of scary. I spent hours in their enclosure, waiting to capture them eating on film. Those birds would chew through your arm if it meant getting out that door and back to the wild,” MacDougall said.

“It was so different from songbirds. I sat in their enclosure to get some footage of them fluttering about before Allison and Hope were scheduled to release them. One would not stop landing on my head, hand, leg, camera, or any other surface near me. It was quite charming. It seemed all the bird wanted to do was make friends and sing me a song.”

Of all the birds of prey at Hope for Wildlife that summer, the fire for freedom seemed to burn hottest in Marlene. Of course, no one really knew why. Most said it was simply the natural instinct of a predator to be free. However, a few wondered if there was a nest that had been left unattended that May. Or whether a mate still looked for her. Eagles bond for life and will only take a new partner if the old one dies, and since Marlene was a full adult, at least five years old, she likely had a mate. Was she desperate to tell him she was still alive? She escaped twice in her third month, both times before success was physically possible. The first attempt came when she was still being held in a small isolation cage. No one knows how she got out. The best guess is that the cage was not properly closed. Whatever the cause, she didn’t hesitate. A group of Hope for Wildlife workers enjoying a mid-summer lunch at a picnic table next to the barn suddenly realized there was an eagle standing between them and the lake, eyeing them warily.

“Oh, look at the eagle there,” said Tiffany Sullivan. The others stopped eating, glanced at the bird, and then at each other. There was silence as they all fell to the same conclusion. If there was an eagle doing nothing in particular, just sitting there between barn and lake in Hope for Wildlife’s backyard and giving a group of stunned workers a baleful stare, the chance was very good that it was one of theirs making a break for it. They jumped up as one and ran towards her.

As it turned out, their instincts may have been dead on, but this probably was not the best capture method. Even a bird recovering from wing surgery, unable to fly, will not sit there impassively when faced by a wave of stampeding wildlife workers. Marlene’s response was to jump into the lake and Sullivan, fearing the bird would drown, followed. Luckily, this part of the lake was not very deep. Sullivan got behind Marlene and tried to keep her from reaching deeper water.

“I started waving my arms in front of the eagle so it would go the other way, rather than towards me. Thank god it worked. The bird jumped back onto dry land and went barrelling off into the bushes on the opposite side of the driveway,” Sullivan said.

Hope for Wildlife raptor specialist Nicole Payne shows the capture net she tried to swim with during Marlene's second escape attempt.

With Sullivan now out of the water and blocking the drive, Sara Seemel took over. She sent another worker for a capture blanket and plunged into the mixture of thorns, weeds, and small bushes in pursuit of Marlene. The exhausted eagle resisted to the end, finally flopping onto her back, talons menacing, in the traditional last-ditch defensive display of a cornered raptor. When the blanket arrived, it was placed over her to neutralize her talons, and a tired, wet, but still furious Marlene was taken back to her cage.

X-rays showed her wing had healed, so Marlene was moved to a flight cage. There, with other birds of prey, she was supposed to relish the space, start flapping, and get her muscles ready for release. It was immediately apparent, however, that Marlene was not going to cooperate. She refused to fly. Other birds were in various stages of pre-release, beating their wings, flying, or gliding from one end of the long cage to the other. But not Marlene. If she wanted to get anywhere in the pen, she did it on the ground. Some workers thought there was still a problem with the wing, others thought that she was sulking after her first foiled escape. A few said she was lonely. Hope Swinimer had her own opinion.

“We could find no medical reason why she wasn’t flying. We thought maybe she was just getting fat and lazy!” Swinimer said.

Whatever the reason, a few weeks went by and Marlene was still behaving like a wingless bird, so Dr. MacEachern was called in. One afternoon, he arrived with Hope for Wildlife Coordinator Allison Dube. Also present was Shannon MacDougall, still on Marlene’s story and eager to film the examination.

Sky Hunters of the Daylight
The diurnal raptors in Nova Scotia:

• Bald eagle
• Broad-winged hawk
• Cooper’s hawk
• Kestrel
• Merlin
• Northern goshawk
• Northern harrier
• Osprey
• Peregrine falcon
• Red-tailed hawk
• Sharp-shinned hawk

“I wasn’t sure why she wasn’t flying as the bone was healed, so I figured I should take a look,” MacEachern said. “We went to the far end of the flight cage to try to make her fly to the other end. Instead, she just ran to the far end on the ground. Allison and I decided to catch her so I could take a look, but when we started towards her, we noticed the door was open. Unfortunately, so did she.”

With her was another running-but-not-flying eagle called Chester.

“As Dr. Barry and I went towards Marlene, she hopped up and—this is the good part—her wing hit the hook that was holding the door closed and knocked it open. She ran out. Chester sort of looked stunned for a second, like he saw us and was thinking about it, and then he also decided to go for the door,” recalls Dube.

However, MacDougall saw it differently. She had been shooting when Dube and MacEachern entered the enclosure and followed them as they went through the door and up to the far end to confront Marlene. She tried to swing the door closed as she went through, camera operating, but it didn’t catch. MacDougall recorded the Marlene and Chester breakout and said it would be part of the resulting video documentary.

Nicole Payne works with an injured osprey. This provincial bird of Nova Scotia is considered by Hope for Wildlife to be the most difficult raptor to work with.

“By next autumn [2010], you’ll be able to watch the spectacle on OasisHD, complete with my voice peeping a muted, ‘oh no’,” she said.

Neither bird was flying when they burst out of the flight cage, but both were making top speed on land. Chester bolted up the hill towards the deer pen. Dube was right behind him. Marlene headed downhill, through a thick patch of thorn bushes next to the lake, with MacEachern giving chase.

Meanwhile, Nicole Payne and Laura Bond were working in Dan’s Den, one of the raccoon enclosures, when they heard shouts for help from the direction of the flight cage. Bond headed up the hill to aid Dube. Payne went to MacEachern’s assistance near the lake. She found him with a net, bogged down in the thorns, saw Marlene on land next to the water, and made a beeline for her.

“Marlene had settled near the lake, but not in the water,” MacEachern remembered. “Then Nicole came running from the other direction straight towards her. Marlene jumped into the lake! Nicole then followed suit and jumped in to get her! I wasn’t sure how Nicole planned to swim, carry a large net, and catch the eagle, but she was determined!”

The steely gaze of a bald eagle. “Those birds would chew through your arm if it meant getting out that door,” said videographer Shannon MacDougall of Arcadia Entertainment.

Payne was known for her work with raptors. They were her first love and she had already begun training for accreditation as a falconer, so MacEachern assumed the situation at the lake was under control and headed back to help catch Chester.

The situation was not under control. The water was much deeper than where Marlene had ditched the first time. Payne had to swim more often than wade and quickly found she could not carry the capture net, so she discarded it. The bird kept moving, but could not lift itself out of the water, and while her feathers gave temporary buoyancy, an eagle’s plumage is not waterproofed like a duck’s. Payne called for a blanket so she could make a hand capture and someone threw her one, but as soon as it hit the lake surface, Payne realized another problem. It immediately absorbed water until moving it was like carrying a massive stone. But she pulled the blanket with her and eventually caught up to Marlene.

Somehow, she got the sodden cloth around the bird, pinned its talons, and struggled to shore. Her wet clothes, the blanket, and the soggy eagle became an almost impossible burden when she tried to climb out. With help, she finally made it up the bank, then crashed alone through the thorn bushes straight to the flight cage, dumped the bird inside, and collapsed from exhaustion. Chester was already back in custody.

A short time later, MacEachern examined Marlene’s wing and found nothing structurally wrong with it. She was just not in shape to fly, and he told Hope’s staff to put her on a physical training program. This consisted of volunteers chasing her up and down the flight cage whenever they fed her. One of those involved in this was Payne.

“Each day, we would get her flying from one end of the flight cage to the other, making notes of how she was progressing. At first, she would hop from end to end while flapping her wings. Eventually, she was starting to get lift and flying further and further. When she was finally ready for release, she was flying around obstacles really well and taking off and landing with excellent control,” she said.

On October 17, 2009, it was Nicole Payne who drove the cardboard carton containing Marlene to Antigonish. Videographer Shannon MacDougall was there to record the end of the adventure. Riley Olstead, her family, and several neighbours came out to North Lakeville Road to view the release.

“It was one of the most beautiful releases I’ve ever seen,” Payne said. “She got up over the trees and just started soaring, higher and higher. She went up hundreds of feet, just enjoying the ability to fly again. She was home.”

As the humans below smiled, shook hands, and prepared to go with Olstead for a meal of celebration, someone noticed a change above them. Now just a speck of black against a grey October sky, Marlene was still circling, but not alone. Another bird had joined the dance, gliding with her in the slow, soaring gyre of an eagle pair.

It was, said Payne, as if someone had been waiting for her.