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Gerhardt: As class acts go, bald eagles are headliners

Published November 4, 2006 at midnight

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Have you ever traced the outline of a bald eagle's wing on a sheet of butcher paper?

I have.

It's a perk that comes with this job.

Capturing the bald eagle was half the adventure, though. It took well into the fourth day and a dozen lagomorphs (rabbits) before we were successful.

News photographer John Gordon and I went to the San Luis Valley to meet Al Harmata, a one-armed, one-legged eagle expert. Al left the other arm and leg in Vietnam and had a prosthetic arm with a mind of its own, reminding us of Dr. Strangelove.

Working with two able assistants, Betsy Spettigue and Susan Werner (currently an area wildlife manager for the Colorado Division of Wildlife), Big Al was using a heavily padded leg-hold trap to capture bald eagles as part of his doctoral program research.

He wanted eagles so he could stitch small radio transmitters to their tail feathers. The transmitters had short antennae that didn't get in the way during mating, and when the bird later molted, it would shed the transmitter as well as the tail feather.

The reason for the transmitter was Big Al and the women would attempt to track migrating eagles from the San Luis Valley in the spring to wherever they eventually nested in Canada, charting their movements, resting sites, food choices and whatever else made sense.

To put the end of the story first, they actually were successful, although it darn near killed them. You see, an eagle floating at a leisurely 30 mph has the advantage of cutting across mountains and lakes, while roaring down back roads in a truck while hanging a radio receiver out the window listening for a faint "ping" was more madness than science.

Anyway, in the San Luis Valley, we were working on the first step, trapping bald eagles, and came up with a golden eagle, ferruginous hawk, a number of ravens, magpies and a coyote, but no eagle.

On the last day, I had to pull the plug because they sort of expected me to show up eventually for work. As we were heading back empty-handed, faintly on our two-way, we heard them calling for us.

Making a quick U-turn on the highway, we went back, and there, in the center of an alfalfa field, was a magnificent bald.

Big Al had it hooded and tethered.

"You absolutely have to maintain them on the tether because if they get away from you with that hood on, the natural tendency is to spiral up and they'll go until they fatigue and then just plummet back to earth," he told me.

In addition to drawing blood, measuring and all the regular biologist stuff, he held it on the hood of his old beater of a pickup, they slipped butcher paper under the wing, and I was given the honor of tracing around it with a pencil.

Let me tell you, bald eagles do have monster wings.

Next, they stitched the radio transmitter on the tail feathers, checked it against the receiver, jotted down the frequency - each signal has its own frequency so you can tell them apart.

Then, he slipped on a glove that looks like the kind welders use, secured the tether and hoisted that bad boy (or girl) up on his arm.

Balds weigh between 11 and 13 pounds, and that is one heavy dude.

As Al held the eagle on his arm, the women stuffed cubes of rabbit meat down its gullet because the animal was in shock, and it can take a day or more for the shock to wear off and the eagle to eat again.

That done, he walked a few feet into the field, held up the bird and released it.

Then you really know how large and powerful those wings are.

Whoomp, whoomp, whoomp they bounded against the air to swoop over the field for a moment, then the bird turned on its side and spiraled up into the air and, within moments, was only a faint "beep" and a memory.

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