Building a tower for injured bald eagles has also built a community of volunteers to help three eagles recover and successfully return to the wild.
Duke Energy workers, state wildlife specialists and others have spent hours designing and constructing a 15-foot-tall tower with three cages big enough to hold the adult bald eagles on private property in Lawrence County. The hacking tower is under construction, and is expected to be ready for the eagles in about a month.
Hacking is the procedure of slowly introducing or reintroducing eagles into the wild, first by caging them in a nesting tower and then allowing them to leave the tower and return for food and a safe place to rest while the birds learn to fend for themselves. An eagle's diet mostly consists of fish, and learning to fish is something that can't be taught in a cage but must be learned in a pond, lake or stream.
The tower is on property owned by Rick and Lola Nicholson. Lola Nicholson is an animal control officer with the Lawrence County Sheriff's Department, and for the past three years she has helped injured animals, including birds that are sometimes transported to Indiana Raptor Center in Brown County.
Her fascination with the rehabilitation of eagles, hawks and owls led her to become a volunteer and then an apprentice with the raptor center. When she learned there were bald eagles at the center that could not be returned to the wild without the use of a hacking tower, Nicholson and her husband decided to help.
"We also call it a soft release tower," she said. "We can take raptors that have been rehabilitated. We want to make sure they're strong enough to make it on their own in the wild."
Building the tower
About six weeks ago, workers with Duke Energy's Bedford division set huge wooden poles that were donated by the company into the ground on the Nicholsons' property. The 55- to 60-foot poles were cut into 20-foot lengths. The workers, led by Brad Braun, construction and maintenance supervisor for the division, dug holes and set the poles up in two days.
"We were rebuilding one of our transmission lines in the area," Braun explained. "Basically, most of the poles were fairly new. We were transitioning from wood poles to steel."
Braun and the other Duke employees were fascinated by an injured barn owl that someone brought to Nicholson while they were installing the poles. Most of the workers, Braun said, are avid hunters and fishermen and were happy to help.
"Our company has been very good to let us do this," he said. "The month of May is community time for us, and we try to do a lot of service projects in our districts."
After the poles were set, the foundation of the tower was laid down. Next, the stairs will be constructed, and then the walls and cages. Once the tower is completed, the cage doors will look out on a private pond only a couple hundred feet away where the eagles can catch fish. There are trees, and perch poles set up around the pond for eagles to use. About a mile away, as the crow — or eagle — flies, is the White River, where wild bald eagles have been seen.
Rex Watters, a wildlife specialist with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources who helped build the original hacking towers at Lake Monroe in the 1980s, has been offering advice and expertise. He said the tower at Lake Monroe was used to reintroduce eagles into the wild up through the mid-1990s but is no longer structurally sound.
One of the three bald eagles that will be the first residents of the hacking tower is an adult that had its flight feathers pulled out when it was run over by a vehicle. The person who hit the bird gathered up the feathers, along with the bird, and took it to the Indiana Raptor Center. Fortunately, seven of the 10 flight feathers have grown back and the eagle is now ready to be released.
"She's become kind of a surrogate parent to these two," said Laura Edmunds, of the Indiana Raptor Center. The "two" are the younger bald eagles. One had a broken leg; the other a bad case of West Nile virus. Neither would be able to be released into the wild without a hacking tower, Edmunds said. The older eagle will help the younger ones learn how to fish and cope in the wild.
"You can't just stick them out there. Unless you are able to put them with wild parents early on, it's a huge problem," Edmunds said.
The eagles are currently in a 140-foot pen at the raptor center. The pen slopes down a hill and has a curve built into it, so the birds must learn how to glide down hills and then flap their wings to generate enough power to fly back uphill. Even so, it's not enough to get the eagles ready for the wild.
"It is a remarkable commitment on the part of the Nicholsons," Edmunds said.
That commitment includes keeping constant watch on the eagles while they are in the hacking tower. At the Lake Monroe tower, another nearby structure was constructed so Department of Natural Resources personnel could watch the birds to ensure their safety and to feed them when they returned to the tower. That was before Wi-Fi and widespread internet.
The new tower will soon have security cameras installed so people can watch a live feed of the eagles. The cameras will be installed by Rick Nicholson, who will be in charge of monitoring the birds. Other volunteers with the Indiana Raptor Center will also monitor the eagles until they leave the tower for good.
"It's just really cool how everything came together," Lola Nicholson said. "It just kind of all went hand-in-hand."
While the bald eagles are the main priority for everyone involved, Lola Nicholson is happy for another aspect: the community of people coming together to work to help Indiana's raptors.