The Sutton Center began hatching bald eagle eggs from Florida in Oklahoma nearly 30 years ago. Assistant Director Lena Larsson said today there are around 150 known nests in the state.
"The goal for the recovery was to have at least 10 eagle nests in Oklahoma, so we surpassed that number," Larsson said.
Egg relocation stopped in 1992, but the center is tracking the fifth generation of those eagles. Ryan VanZant has climbed plenty of trees to put transmitters on eagles just before they’re ready to fly.
"We take the transmitters that go on with a backpack using Teflon ribbon that goes kind of over the shoulder and across the front and underneath their wings," VanZant said. "When the bird’s flapping its wings, that harness doesn’t rub the bird’s skin."
There’s one eagle of particular interest to the Sutton Center this year. She hatched near Jackson Bay on Fort Gibson Lake in 2012. I’ll refer to her as Jackie, though she doesn't actually have a name. Senior biologist Dan Renking said Jackie’s been consistent.
"It spent its first summer in Minnesota, near Minneapolis, and returned to northwestern Arkansas for its first winter," Renking said. "And in the following summer it went north again, this time a little farther north, up into Canada, and spent the summer and early fall on Lake Winnipeg."
Last October, the Sutton staff got a call from Dr. Pat Redig, founder of the University of Minnesota Raptor Center. It was about Jackie.
"It was found in a ditch on Highway 68 — reasonable assumption that she was hit by a car and had a broken leg," Redig said.
The fracture was in the tarsometatarsus, one of a bird’s few solid bones — and an oddly shaped one at that — so a pin couldn’t be inserted into it.
"There’s very limited amount of bone where we could actually drive the pins through and not be skewering tendons and other soft tissue — important soft tissue structures," Redig said. "In fact, before I did the surgery on this one, I had a dead eagle in the freezer.
"I pulled that out and thawed it out and did a very meticulous dissection ahead of time so I would know exactly where we could put pins and how we were going to go about doing this."
Director Steve Sherrod said there was a lot of anxiety around the Sutton Center.
"The eagle’s fate, at that time, was in their hands, and so all we could do is wait and see how the operation came out," Sherrod said. "Pat’s always cautious, and he indicated a thumbs up, that it was a good operation, but you never know."
Jackie also had a broken pelvis that needed to heal on its own, but she progressed well. Raptor center staff flexed and extended her surgically repaired leg joint twice a week starting five weeks after surgery.
She went from lying down in a small cage in November to being ready to fly again on May 1.
"What we do is we put a pair of leather straps on their legs called jesses and then attach that to a long nylon parachute cord," Redig said. "We just take them out to an open field here on the campus, and people throw the bird up in the air and just let it fly out to the end of the line."
On June 27, Jackie started flying north, fully recovered from an injury that could have killed her. She summered on Lake Winnipeg again. Sherrod said there was one benefit to her injury.
"We were able to put a new transmitter on this eagle … so we’ll have an extended ability to follow it, hopefully until it does come back and nest," Sherrod said.
The new transmitter last had Jackie at Stockton Lake, 80 miles northeast of Joplin. Sherrod and Redig hope her journey reminds people how difficult ordinary human life can be for wildlife.
