Eaglet in Yorktown with a bellyful of trash is a lesson on litter

The fledgling bald eagle was discovered on the ground nearly two weeks ago at Naval Weapons Station Yorktown — weak, emaciated and with a badly broken wing.

A wildlife rehabilitator was called in, and the eaglet was stabilized and transported to the Wildlife Center of Virginia in Waynesboro.

But veterinary staff there discovered the young bird also had toxic levels of lead in its system; the reading was so high their machine almost couldn’t read it.

Then an X-ray — and, later, a necropsy — discovered something else. The eaglet also had a bellyful of trash: two latex balloons, a thumbtack, a soda can pull-tab, plastic wrapper, cardboard shreds and bits of hard plastic.

The combination of injuries and ingested trash was the most severe the center’s staff had ever seen, said Amanda Nicholson, director of outreach.

“This poor bird had a lot of things going on,” Nicholson said. “Unfortunately, with his really poor body condition, the really high lead level, the complicated fracture, it really had so much going on that the vet decided to humanely euthanize him.”

They did so on June 27, one day after he’d arrived. Now the staff is conducting more tests to try to figure out where the lead came from. The results could take weeks or months, said Nicholson.

There’s no way of knowing how the bird’s wing suffered a spiral fracture, she said. Or how or why he ingested so much garbage.

Did he scavenge a fish, turtle or small bird that had already consumed them? Did he eat them himself, mistaking them for food? Or was he so starved from his injury, unable to forage, that he was willing to gobble down anything?

“We don’t know all the history and the sequence of events,” Nicholson said. “But we know trash and litter is a problem for a lot of different kinds of wildlife out there.”

Even something as seemingly harmless and biodegradable as an apple core or banana peel tossed from a car window can have a ripple effect, she said — attracting raccoons or other small animals that can then get hit by vehicles. Then eagles or other raptors can prey on the road kill, putting them at risk, too.

Balloons are a particular hazard, experts say.

“It is amazing when you think about it,” Nicholson said. “People who wouldn’t otherwise litter somehow don’t see balloons in the same way. But that’s essentially what they are — just litter that you’re throwing into the air. And, ultimately, it will come down and cause some problems.”

Bryan Watts, a bird expert at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, knows those problems well.

“People don’t really understand when they release these helium-filled balloons that these things last for a long time,” Watts said. “We see them washing up on the barrier islands and all along the coast. The beaches are just covered with them, because they fly out over the ocean and then they wash up. And so then it becomes a debris that doesn’t deteriorate very quickly.”

This is the tail end of fledgling season for eagles in Hampton Roads, he said, and younger eagles that haven’t yet become accomplished foragers are more likely to scavenge for scraps in less ideal, riskier ways.

In fact, Watts conducted a study on local eagles scavenging in landfills. He and his team satellite-tracked more than 60 bald eagles and delineated all the landfills throughout the bay region.

They found that birds 2 years and younger are far more likely to scavenge in landfills, with birds in their first year, or hatch-year, the biggest users of all.

“In fact, they use landfills at 6 times the rate of adults,” Watts said. “Hatch-year birds use landfills twice as often as other juveniles.”

A paper on those results, called “Landfill Use by Bald Eagles in the Chesapeake Bay Region,” is set to publish in September in The Journal of Raptor Research. Co-authors are Courtney Turrin and Elizabeth Mojica.

Watts is director and co-founder of the Center for Conservation Biology, which is affiliated with both William and Mary and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. As such, he conducts annual surveys of eagles and other birds throughout Hampton Roads.

He said he’s wrapped up this year’s eagle survey, which found record numbers of bald eagles along the James River: 326 nesting pairs producing 313 young.

“It’s a phenomenal recovery,” Watts said. “We were at zero in the mid-70s, so all of this is recovery from zero.”

The eagle population was decimated in the 1970s by the pesticide DDT, which has since been banned.

Dietrich can be reached by phone at 757-247-7892.