A bald eagle flapped his wings briskly and soared into the cloudy sky after being released Tuesday at Navajo Lake, the same place he was found a year ago so weakened by lead poisoning he couldn’t fly.
The eagle, later named Toucan Sam, had ingested so much lead — most likely from eating a fish that had swallowed a fishing sinker — that it was too high for a machine to measure.
The machine can gauge more than triple the amount of lead considered dangerous, and for the eagle to exceed that level and survive has his caregivers marveling.
“He should be dead,” said Lori Paras, executive director of the Santa Fe Raptor Center in El Rito, where Toucan Sam was nursed back to health. “He’s a miracle.”
Lead is a neurotoxin that affects an eagle’s ability to fly, navigate, hunt and breed. In high enough doses, it can cause impaired breathing, seizures and death.
Eagles that become disoriented from lead poisoning cannot hunt and begin to starve. The hunger eats away their breast muscles, making them unable to fly and further weakening them.
Toucan Sam needed about six months of chelation therapy to remove the lead from his system, Paras said. The treatments would draw out the lead from his bones and then the toxins would go back into the blood, requiring more chelation.
Lead in his brain caused him to go temporarily blind five times, Paras said.
The eagle also was put on an herbal diet to cleanse his liver, she said.
After the lead was purged, the eagle needed another six months to recover, Paras said. “He was so exhausted, his body was such a mess, that he couldn’t fly far. He’d just pant.”
They released him at Navajo Lake because that is the winter migratory stop for bald eagles flying south from Alaska, Paras said, noting about 40 have been tallied there.
In a couple of weeks, Toucan Sam will join his fellow eagles on a return trek to Alaska.
“His flight was so beautiful,” Paras said.
The eagle’s near-death experience reflects a larger problem.
Toxic lead was found in the bones of 46 percent of bald and golden eagles sampled in 38 states, with elevated exposures often occurring in the fall and winter, coinciding with hunting season in many regions, according to a report in the journal Science.
Animal scraps, known as gut piles, that hunters leave behind for scavengers to devour often contain lead bullet shards. And lead sinkers on fishing lines can fall off and end up in the bellies of fish.
The findings are a troubling setback for the bald eagle, America’s iconic national bird, which rebounded from the brink of extinction after the pesticide DDT was banned in 1972 — enabling it to be removed from the Endangered Species List in 2007.
Some wildlife advocates have called for a ban on all lead shot and fishing tackle.
But a group that describes itself as balancing conservation with the interests of hunters and anglers believes a better approach is to encourage the use of nontoxic metals, such as tungsten and copper.
Hunters in particular are embracing nontoxic ammunition after seeing that it performs as well, if not better, than lead bullets, said Jesse Deubel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation.
“We’re building so much momentum and it’s increasing in popularity so much,” Deubel said. “I think regulations would actually be kind of a setback because you get this automatic defensive reaction.”
Deubel contends most hunters are conservation-minded and care about all wildlife, not just the species they hunt. That includes eagles harmed by lead shot embedded in entrails or small game like a quail or rabbit, he said.
He said he was glad to hear the lead-poisoned eagle recovered and he hopes more hunters and anglers will choose nontoxic metals to eventually make those kinds of incidents a thing of the past.
For now, lead use in hunting and fishing remains a real threat to eagles, Paras said.
The center cares for four to six lead-poisoned eagles a year, she said, calling that a lot for the Santa Fe area.
Her team works to increase public awareness about the dangers lead bullets and sinkers pose to these majestic birds.
Hunters, she said, cut out the entrails that contain the lead bullet and throw it on the ground, not to be malicious but because they don’t know the harm it can cause. The key is to educate without being adversarial, she added.
“We’re not out to stop the hunter; we’re out to change the bullet,” Paras said.
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