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teaching an eagle to fly Sorry to hold you up, I said to the windshield as I drove through snow-covered fields back towards town. I've been trying to teach an eagle how to fly... The voice on the other end of the cell phone connection laughed. "No problem, I'm not ready to leave yet, anyway." So my eagle passenger still had a connecting ride towards a veterinarian, and then the rehabilitator, who lives a couple hundred miles away. When I opened the box on the washing machine this morning, I wasn't sure what I would find. It had been awfully quiet all night, so I was afraid I would just find a dead eagle. But it wasn't. The bird delivered to me in a semi-clandestine rendezvous at a truck stop on the interstate last night looked just fine. Which was the weird part. There were no signs of injury on this eagle. None at all. The two travelers that picked it up off the county road should have wonderful nighttime shots on their cell phones of this eagle spreading its wings while in my hands. And still, even now in the daylight, it looks just fine. They found it on the roadway, right next to the river. It was too dark for them to know it, but they found this eagle quite near where I killed a deer two days before. I figure there's a good chance it has simply overstuffed itself on deer meat. The flesh hanging from its beak suggests I may be right. Once it has had time to digest its gluttonous feast, it should be just fine. But when I threw it, literally, into the air at the little pulloff on the road north of town early this morning, the eagle just gently glided down into a controlled landing. And sat there. After several repeated attempts at throwing a big bird into the sky, all I had to show for it was a pissed off bird, a tiny bleeding hole near my wrist, and stinky eagle shit all over the front of my good winter coat. But I noticed early on, one odd thing. The eagle never used its talons. Not once. Not to grip the wooden posts I set it on, not to attack me, not even to cushion its landings. They just stayed curled up in balls. Even when I pried the individual toes out. This is bad. This is a typical symptom of lead poisoning. I think back to the lead bullet I shot into that deer's head... And ferry the eagle on to the next leg of its trip to the vet. |
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