Oops!

I spent the first 21 years of my life growing up in suburban Michigan so my experiences with nature up until that point were pretty limited. Luckily the Muse recognized how misplaced I was and whisked me off to live in the woods. Although I loved it immediately it took a while before I started to understand that nature has it’s own modus operandi.

We hadn’t been here long when we stumbled across this baby eagle on the ground (he was much smaller at first, but those pictures are really blurry). His parent’s nest was hopelessly out of reach 40 or 50 feet above us and we weren’t able to tell if it was occupied so we took to checking in on him a couple of times each day. At first his parents attended to him regularly (with yummy decapitated prairie dogs) but unfortunately they stopped feeding him after a couple of days. I called our local game and fish department and a warden came out, took one look at him, and explained that if he had been a bald eagle they would have rescued him but because he was a golden eagle it was their policy to let nature take it’s course........ Apparently it was completely normal for the dominant chick (are they even called chicks?) to oust it’s weaker sibling to it’s death.........he just wasn’t a keeper. Because those were our pre-internet days, we headed to the library and found that a complete diet for our new charge consisted of a mixture of organ and muscle meats. Rabid vegetarians that we were (at that time) we hungrily went shopping for prey and our days became regularly scheduled games of tossing meat at the taloned carnivore. Time has blurred my memory, but I remember this as going on for two or three weeks before we finally found a rookie warden (from a different game and fish office) who clumsily came to our rescue. He looked like he was fresh from college and needed tending to as much as our little bird did (and the fact that he showed up completely unprepared with a torn cardboard box and a pair of gloves didn’t exactly inspire confidence either). But together, we managed to capture Oops and boy ranger used his belt to tie the box shut before taking him to a qualified rescuer.

That nest in the eagle tree is still used every summer and as far as I know, there haven’t been any more oustings.