Then it pooped

Daniel Barber runs the landfill in Cook County, Georgia. Just after midday on Wednesday 26 August he found a bald eagle lying on the ground, not moving. He took it for dead, which is what anyone would think, because a live eagle does not lie still while a man walks up to it. Then it pooped. That is the only reason anyone knows what happened next.

Barber rang the sheriff's office. Regenia Wells, the county's animal investigator, came out with Sergeant Chris Powell, and they drove the bird to Quailwood Animal Hospital in Tifton. Chet Powell, who has worked with wildlife in that part of Georgia for years, heard about it two counties away and drove over. When he got there the eagle was so still that he thought it had died too. He started checking it for an injury, and then he felt it breathe.

The night

The vet, Dr Larry Branch, was out of the state. Megan Walker, who works at the practice, phoned him and told him what she was looking at, and he said to start straight away. She and two colleagues, Jake Gibbs and Savannah Maton, put fluids, antibiotics and food into the bird through tubes and injections, and the whole thing took a few minutes, and when Branch got back that evening he did it all again. Nobody thought the eagle would live through the night.

Next morning

In the morning there was no phone call, and instead Walker sent him a photograph of the bird that had been lying flat on the table the afternoon before, now standing up in its enclosure and staring straight into the camera. Powell said it looked like it wanted to know what had happened to it, and why it had woken up in jail. It ate meat off a pair of forceps, drank on its own, and settled on a branch they had put in as a perch, and by Friday the vet thought it wanted out as soon as they would let it. So they took it into a bigger room and let it go, and it flew straight to the far end, and when they tried again it flew again.

Saturday

The last question was where to let it go, because you normally put an eagle back close to where you found it, since they are territorial and the adults pair for life, and nobody thought a landfill was the right place to put a bird back. So they chose Paradise Public Fishing Area instead, which is 1,351 acres of lakes and tall trees near Enigma that the state looks after, and they announced it on Friday afternoon. On Saturday, with a day's notice, somewhere between 350 and 400 people came out and stood round the water, and at 1:16 in the afternoon, Branch and Walker opened the carrier.