LIZ CRANDALL

You finally find your true love, the one you want to spend the rest of your life with. You realize it once again on this perfect day when he brings you fresh-caught fish for a romantic dinner high above the world. You fly with the sunset to your favorite spot beside a marsh and fall asleep to the songs of the night. The next morning you both fly out, planning to meet here in the evening. That afternoon you return and prepare. As the sun sinks lower, you grow anxious for his return. When night falls you are frantic. The next morning, you still wait for him, and the next, and the next, and the next …

Night rain cools the oppressive air as Liz Crandall and her crew climb stiffly from the white van that carried them six hours to southeast Georgia. The group circles the van like security guards. Jamie Bellah breaks away and heads into the motel off Interstate 95 in Pooler.
“Is there a side entrance?” Bellah asks the desk clerk as he books two rooms. She nods and points down the hall.
Moments later, two women from the van balance a large sheet-covered object between them. Checking the hallway to make sure no one watches, they scoot through the door. Liz, arms crossed, watches calmly.
“I hope he doesn’t cry,” she says.

She’s worrying about the bald eagle under the white sheet that she, Bellah, the director of the Southeastern Raptor Center, and a team of volunteers are smuggling into the motel. It’s the only way to keep the bird safe for tomorrow’s reunion with the mate who has waited for him since he disappeared from Georgia’s coastal marshes in February. That’s when he arrived, broken and bruised, at the Auburn University raptor center.
Raptors are Liz Crandall’s passion. For the last three and a half years she’s run the day-to-day operations of the raptor center, making life-or-death decisions for dozens of birds at a time, birds that slammed into buildings, birds hit by cars, birds shot by lawbreakers, birds with their feathers cut off by cruel captors, birds sick with undiagnosed infections, birds that can barely be birds because they were raised by humans. Her feathered patients are often half as tall as a human male, with wingspans as wide as an NBA player height. Her patient today, the male eagle they snuck into the hotel, isn’t the biggest bird she’s cared for — female eagles are bigger — but he’s impressive.

“I hope he can get off the ground,” Liz says. At nearly eight pounds, he’s a pound heavier than they expected. The individual lives of her birds engage her as she moves through her day tending some eighty hawks, owls, kestrels, and even turkey buzzards, in addition to juggling the schedules of fifty volunteers. Rehab workers aren’t supposed to attach to their patients. To that end, they don’t give cute names to the birds they hope to return to the wild, instead assigning numbers. The male bedding down in the motel room with forest green carpet is 08-030, meaning he was the thirtieth bird treated at the rehab center in 2008.

He arrived there six months ago with a fractured ulna and injured feet. An eagle’s wing is analogous to our arm. From its shoulder to midway down the wing is the humerus. From the elbow, where the humerus ends, are two bones, the radius and the ulna. In eagles, the ulna is the larger of the two. Once broken, the bird is doomed. It cannot fly.

Over the months of 08-030’s treatment, the staff came to believe he was hit by a car. The foot injuries, which damaged the hallux — the opposing toe that allows birds to grasp for perching — may be the avian equivalent of road rash.
The eagle’s wing requires a splint, and the bird endures daily physical therapy, with Liz or a volunteer flexing and extending his legs and repeatedly extending his wings. He doesn’t like it.
“He resented our handing him – which is good,” said Elizabeth Rush, center veterinarian. “The more defensive and aggressive they are, the better they do once they’re released.”
Inside the raptor hospital a feisty barred owl demonstrates how to succeed under treatment. Stephanie Stillwell, a volunteer from Valley, grips the struggling raptor securely to her chest but he still tries to squirm away from the eye drops Liz administers. The bird, which came in with cataracts in each eye, has a new lens in one and is scheduled for a second lens transplant.
A broad-winged hawk gulps food greedily, less concerned with his captors than with his food. This time, Liz has to give him seconds. Other raptors have to be force fed, fighting desperately the very thing that will save their lives.
Then there’s Foghorn, the red-tail hawk raised by humans. He’s the exception. He can never return to the wild, so it’s lucky he willingly plays the role of center mascot. Each day, Liz brings him to the hospital to oversee the activity. There he plays with his tiny toy mouse, offers occasional squawky comments, gives gentle bites, and steals pens, and Liz’s glasses. Liz pets him and talks to him the way people to talk to their dogs. When another red-tail eats dinner, Foggy makes squawky little whines, like a dog begging at the table.

As a girl in Georgia, Liz, thirty-five, didn’t grow up expecting to rescue animals for a living. But when she was twenty-one, she found four baby squirrels in her parents’ front yard, fallen from their nest. “I treated them, fed them. I was enamored by the little creatures and just wanted to take care of them.”

The tending began a subtle change in her. Three of the four lived, and her commitment to wildlife kindled. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Auburn University, with dreams of someday working with wild bears or wolves. She thought of the raptor center job as a way station to that goal, but the raptors won her over. A vacation trip to Idaho last summer to work with wildlife showed her there was no turning back.
“I went and worked on a bear project, and you know, the coolest thing to me was seeing the eagles fly around.”
On her days off from the center Liz keeps working with wildlife, searching for bats in Chewacla State Park, or banding songbirds near Midway.
Bellah praises her first-rate technical skills, but says what makes her special is her zeal for the animals. “She has enthusiasm for what she does and it’s contagious. … When you have the gift of enthusiasm, people around you catch on. To me that is what is so enjoyable about Liz. It’s pretty obvious she loves what she does.”
When a raptor arrives at the Auburn center, it needs that kind of commitment. Their lives balance on a knife-edge. Their injuries are only part of the problem. The stress of captivity can kill them. And 08-030 was under a lot of stress before he even got to Auburn.

Panic in the Aviary
Dale and Donna Hardie, whose back yard opens onto the watery sweep of Savannah’s coastal marsh, like watching the eagles that hunt there. One morning in February, Dale was having coffee on the back porch and noticed a bald eagle perched on a low branch in the yard. It begged to be photographed. But when he approached with a camera, the eagle startled and jumped to the ground. It held its right wing close to its body. Something was wrong with this bird. He called the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The eagle ran from the DNR officer, weeble-wobbling like a toddler running from parents with broccoli. Dale brought out his shrimp net, finally catching the bird when its talons tangled in the netting. “Get a blanket,” he shouted to his wife.
“Donna ran into the house and grabbed some designer Christian Dior king-sized blanket,” Dale said. “It was the most expensive one in the house.” The DNR officer took the luxuriously swaddled eagle to a local animal hospital. From there, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service summoned Liz to bring the bird to Auburn.
The Hardies never saw the blanket again.

For eagle 08-030, it’s been a long, strange trip. So he seems unfazed by his hotel accommodations August 1, some 280 miles from Auburn. He doesn’t know his journey is about to come full circle.
Until July 18, eagle 08-030 lived alone in a giant aviary, getting in shape for his return to the wild. That morning, Liz is in the rehab center’s hospital when volunteer Kathy Gerken pulls her aside for a whispered conversation. Liz nods twice, strands of purple-streaked hair bobbing, and the two stride from the air-conditioned retreat of the hospital into the blast-furnace morning, quickly covering the distance to an aviary the size of an elongated one-car garage. As they draw nearer, dull thudding sounds grow louder. Kathy and Liz pull on long gloves made of tough leather and enter the aviary. The number of sickening thuds increases as a female bald eagle throws herself against one wall and then another.
This is eagle 08-100 and she is freaking out.

The young bird — too young to show the characteristic white eagle head — arrived at the center June 3 weak and emaciated. Someone found her at a dumpster in Chester, Georgia. Although vets couldn’t diagnose an illness, the female eagle wouldn’t eat or drink. Staff members had to force-feed her, shoving a rubber tube down her throat. But by July 7, she was “eating aggressively,” Liz said, and on July 10 she was moved from a cage to an aviary where she could stretch her wings and rebuild muscle mass lost in her confinement. After that, maybe instinct took over, and her natural fear of humans led to this panic attack.
Liz and Kathy calmly close in on the frenzied bird. A series of heart-sinking thuds follow the muffled beats of wings. Finally, Kathy grabs the bird and the two women put the eagle on its back. The bird resists for only a moment, sensing, perhaps, there is nothing more she can do.

They rush the large bird across the dry grass to the hospital. Liz looks the raptor over closely. It is majestic and frightened. More than two-feet tall from head to foot, 08-100 keeps her mouth open wide and her tongue sticking out as though gasping for breath. It’s a sign of her stress. The bird’s shoulders are bloody and raw from where she slammed against walls. Liz cleans the wounds with saline solution and carefully cuts away scabbed tissue and bloody feathers. The bird’s chest rises and falls rapidly.

Applying a white ointment to a large cotton swab, Liz dabs each wound. The bird looks around the room with startled brown eyes. But she doesn’t seem to take anything in, not the tray of dead white mice, their bodies open like gaping pink mouths, not the freezers full of raptor food, not the stainless sink full of thawing mice, rats, chicks, and quail. Later, using special scissors, Liz will cut the mice in thirds, intestines clinging to the scissor blade. She weighs the heads, guts, and tails, and distributes them into piles on a cutting board. Each mouse body is raptor medicine, injected with a drug needed by one ailing bird or another. With 08-100’s wounds treated, Liz decides against putting her back into the aviary where she battered herself so cruelly. Instead, they will do something they’ve never tried before at the rehab center: putting two eagles in the same aviary. This jumpy female will share a larger aviary with the bald eagle male whose mate still awaits him — 08-030 — in hopes his companionship calms her. For these birds, stress is the fiercest enemy. “You can actually kill a bird by over-stressing them,” Liz says. When an injured bird first arrives at the center, Liz may limit its care to strictly life-saving measures, waiting for it to acclimate before beginning more extensive testing and treatment. “The more we handle the birds, the more likely when they’re stressed they’ll die. I’ve seen it happen.” Crandall sees things from the bird’s perspective. Coming to the rehab center “is probably equivalent to being kidnapped by aliens,” she says.

The male 08-030 is cautious about the humans entering his domain, even after nearly half a year at the center. He flies to the back of the wood-sided enclosure, as far away as he can get. Kathy releases the female. The female flies to the far wall and thuds against it. But the bird’s panic seems to stop here, and she settles down about two yards from the male. She sneaks a look at her new companion while he keeps his eyes on the humans. She studies the humans and he glances her way before looking away again. The introduction complete, Kathy stays outside the aviary, leather gloves at her side in case the eagles fight. All through the hot day, someone will watch the eagles, but the eagles remain calm, settling together peaceably.

A Sad Day for Owls
Just beyond 08-100’s new home are smaller, hexagonal aviaries. These operate as a sort of step-down unit, the place severely injured birds go when they’re on the mend but not quite ready for a flight aviary. Four pint-size barn owls, looking like cuddly stuffed toys with their white disk-shaped faces, occupy one hex. The orphaned owls, emaciated when they came in, are improving, gaining weight, and will soon return to the wild.

On a late July morning, Liz is in the hospital watching senior vet school students force-feed several birds. Staffer Tyler Eads approaches, and as they talk, Liz looks grim. She follows Eads to the hexagonal aviaries. Loose feathers litter the ground. Three barn owls huddle together on a high plank. Beneath them is the body of the fourth owl, its midsection torn away. Sometime in the night a wild animal reached through the slat construction of the aviary and grabbed the bird from behind. Already flies swarm the carcass. “It’s very upsetting, especially when they’re releasable,” Crandall says. She looks like she might cry. But she moves quickly to her duties. “We put so much work into them.” She puts he disfigured carcass into a garbage bag. The bagged body goes into the freezer. Later it will be taken to the vet school for incineration.

There is not much anyone can do with a bird as badly mauled as this one. But often even dead birds serve a purpose. When an animal is euthanized, the body is preserved, gutted, and used as a feeding puppet: A volunteer, with a hand inside the puppet, places food in the puppet’s mouth. Then the puppet feeds young birds, preventing them from imprinting on their human caretakers. An imprinted bird can never return to the wild, and some of the center’s permanent residents are imprinted birds picked up by well-meaning people who didn’t realize that young birds might only appear abandoned. After three weeks of hand-feeding, the young bird cannot distinguish between its own species and humans.

Such a bird will not know how to mate, will not know how to hunt, and may approach humans, which puts it in further danger. In a large flight aviary where a dozen or more hawks await release, Liz picks up a long flight feather. Later, this feather may help another bird return to the wild quickly. When injured birds lose feathers, a little epoxy, and a toothpick inserted in the feather’s hollow shaft provides a reliable transplant in a process called imping. Without imping, birds with lost feathers would have to remain in captivity until their annual molt. Despite the size and ferocity of these birds, the wild raptors present little danger to their caretakers. It’s a different story with most of the center’s permanent raptor residents. Those have no fear of humans and can be dangerous. Still, Liz was attacked once by a great horned owl, which punctured her eye — an injury Liz dismisses as insignificant.

But her cool vanishes, her colleagues attest, in the presence of a bird parasite harmless to humans known as a ked. “Keds are very quick and when they land on you, they automatically look for a place to go and hide, like up a shirt sleeve or in your hair,” Bellah says. In their presence, it’s Liz that freaks out. “I have definitely seen some interesting dances and heard some interesting vocalizations from Liz when the keds start flying around,” Bellah says.

The Return of the Native
It’s August 2, a bright cool morning in Savannah, and a large crowd gathers in the Hardies’ backyard awaiting the release of 08-030. Some spectators were drawn by large signs around town advertising the 9 a.m. release, and some found the eagle release information online. Others came from the garage sale two doors down to see what all the commotion is about. Reporters with cameras, voice recorders, and notepads are everywhere, talking to anyone who knows anything. As the hour passes, the raptor center crew is still fielding questions from the local media and the crowd grows anxious.

Finally Liz breaks free. She thanks the crowd for coming, acknowledges everyone’s work, and explains that 08-030 is returning to this spot because, somewhere, his mate waits. In the hands of center volunteer Ralph Wood, eagle 08-030 looks around. He is calm while Ralph poses for photos, and the spectators transform into paparazzi. After too many camera flashes to count, the bird grows nervous. It’s time to let him go. The crowd stills; the air is quiet. Ralph looks to Liz, and with a nod, she signals it’s time. With a deep sigh, Ralph tosses the big bird into the air, and with a few powerful wing beats, the eagle lifts high over the marshland. For the first time since February, 08-030 is free. He soars over the marsh and circles back above the crowd. Whispers rise from spectators.

Will he find his mate, they wonder. The male eagle takes his time. He perches on a branch of a live oak a hundred feet above the crowd, his back to the humans, observing everything the land has to offer. The Hardies last saw his mate some three weeks ago. No one knows if she is still near. After ten minutes, 08-030 turns back to the crowd, stares for a moment, and flies away. “He has it made here,” Liz says, watching 08-030 soar into blue sky. A cool breeze carries off the marsh. “He’ll be happy here.

He’ll be really happy.” It’s been six months. If it’s meant to be, it will be, you tell yourself. You ignore the human activity in that back yard in Savannah. You avoid the crowd. From time-to-time you think you spot him snatching fish from a marsh or soaring over trees and rooftops. You hope he’s looking for you, as you’ve been looking for him. You are certain of one thing; someday, somehow, you will meet again and fly over the marshland where the two of you fell in love over, and over, and over…