While there isn’t much that seems to unite us nowadays, you’re not likely to find many people who don’t feel like celebrating a little when they hear about someone helping an animal.
That becomes all the more true when the critter is particularly small and adorable, but some incredible acts of heroism stand on their own no matter what was saved in the process.
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But as tremendous as those moments are, we can see similarly life-saving work with even larger implications happening every day. After all, when an animal is endangered, it’s usually the work of some seriously dedicated professionals and volunteers that prevents them from crossing that final frontier of extinction.
Yet as we’ll see in one affirming video, we can sometimes find that the same people doing this steady but important work will also have to step up and become the more classical kind of hero when a tense situation arises.
And one lucky bald eagle had a team of them watching over it.
On April 26, the Institute for Wildlife Studies uploaded a video captured by one of its cameras at the Channel Islands in California to YouTube.
As CNN reported , the camera was one of many monitoring 21 bald eagle nests there as part of the bald eagle restoration project and caught a moment that required the conservation team’s immediate attention.
Because it turns out that the eagle we see here didn’t check its surroundings carefully enough before it took off from the nest.
As ecologist Peter Sharpe described it, that’s because the way it kicked its legs upon takeoff knocked a baby that was sleeping nest to its feet out of the nest.
We can see it in the middle of its tumble here and the eaglet would end up falling over 10 feet into a steep gully on the side of this cliff.
It took Sharpe and two of his colleagues some time to reach the area, but they soon rappelled down to check on the eaglet’s status.
And fortunately, the three-week-old baby didn’t seem to sustain any injuries and was found to have been eating and sleeping well up to that point.
This meant Sharpe’s team was able to return it to its nest without any further incident and he’ll be back within two to three weeks to tag the bird’s leg, measure it, and determine its sex.
Between five to seven weeks after that, the eaglet should be able to start flying on its own.
This incident marked the second baby eagle Sharpe has had to rescue after it fell from its nest within the last week and ensuring the safety of each one is paramount to the project.
As he told CNN, “They’re part of a restoration project that’s been going on for over 40 years. A lot of effort’s been put into restoring the eagles. The loss of one chick in a season can have quite a big impact. We’re just trying to maximize the number of chicks that reach maturity.”
And as the video here shows, he and his team are hoping that the way they’ve buttressed the nest prevents this little one from falling again.
h/t: CNN
