Officials at the Alaska Raptor Center had to euthanize a bald eagle last week. An x-ray revealed that it had been shot.

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Veterinarian Victoria Vosburg says the Alaska Raptor Center heard there was an eagle lingering in a trailer park near Indian River on Wednesday night.

“People had been able to approach the bird, and a dog had walked right up to the bird. That’s not normal,” Vosburg said. “So we went out there. It was hard to find the bird because it was under some trees. But we were able to capture it.”

What Vosburg and bird rehabilitation coordinator Jennifer Cederleaf found was a fairly large female with a brood patch.

“A brood patch is where the adult eagles pluck their own feathers out so they can rest their bare, warm skin on the eggs to incubate them,” Vosburg said.

So, the bird definitely, at one point, had a nest.

“We took the injured bird back to the Raptor Center, took an x-ray, and that’s when we learned it had been shot, actually a little while ago,” she said.

Bird bones tend to shatter, not break cleanly, and when they heal, Vosburg says the X-ray image appears fuzzy. A fuzzy image, plus the eagle’s low body weight and dull talons told them it had been on the ground a while. The X-ray also revealed a bullet.

“It actually looks whiter than bone does on the X-ray,” she said. “Just because a bird has been shot, that’s not a reason to euthanize. But this bird was shot right in the elbow, and we would not have been able to repair this elbow to the point where the bird could ever fly and hunt again.”

It’s not uncommon for large birds to suffer injuries in Sitka. And when they do, they usually end up at the Raptor Center. But the shooting of a bird is rare. And illegal.

“The first offense is punished with up to a year in jail and/or fines of up to $100,000,” said Bruce Woods, spokesman for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Alaska. “It would depend entirely on the case.”

The federal Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act makes it illegal to harm, possess, sell, export, import or do just about anything to an eagle, really, except look at it.

“The laws around any migratory bird, if you delve into the laws, are relatively strict,” Woods said. “With eagles, for instance, it’s illegal to even possess eagle feathers, unless you’re a Native American or an Alaska Native who’s received them through the bald and golden eagle repository.”

Woods says his agency hears about one or two instances of eagle shootings every year, but it’s not a regular thing.

Vosburg says euthanizing the bird makes this case particularly tragic, especially since that wasn’t the original plan.

“We were thinking in terms of ‘How fast can we release this bird to get it back to the next to save its babies?’ It didn’t even occur to us that this was going to be a euthanasia,” she said. “When we took that x-ray and saw how bad it was, we were both pretty heartbroken. After doing this for 20 years, it’s still heartbreaking to have to euthanize an eagle.”

Anyone with information about someone harming an eagle is asked to call U.S. Fish and Wildlife in Anchorage at 907-786-3309, and ask for law enforcement.