Fish Eagle Rescue Mission

01 May 2020 / By Gareth
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A big part of what we aim to do at Mission Geeks is to support the work of conservation organisations in Africa. On this particular occasion though, we found ourselves directly involved!

We’d heard that a fish eagle had been injured in a fight with another male down on the local dam so we went out in a boat and eventually spotted the eagle with a badly injured wing. We came back home and contacted Bruce Woods in Lusaka for advice. Bruce is a bird-of-prey expert and recently opened ‘‘A Different Wild Rehabilitation Sanctuary’ in Lusaka.

He encouraged us to try to capture the eagle and get it down to Lusaka where he’d be able to try to rehabiliate it. He gave us lots of detailed instructions on how to go about catching and caring for it and feeling suitably armed with this knowledge Stew, Jon and I set off for the dam on a mission!

Launching the inflatable Mission Geeks boat to see if we could find the injured eagle.
We spotted the fish eagle sitting on a grass bank and made our way slowly over to it.
It was very weak and hardly moved as we approached.
Stew was able to gently cover it with a towel and get back into the boat with the eagle in his arms.
Stew held the eagle safely while we headed slowly back to the bank.
Having got the eagle safely home, we strengthened an old cardboard box with wooden slats and installed a sturdy branch for the eagle to perch on.
The fish eagle in his temporary home, his severe injury evident on his left wing.
With careful instructions from Bruce, Stew was able to get lots of ORS into the eagle and it soon gained strength and began to eat lots of Stew's fish fillets.
As he got stronger, we began to hope that we might actually be able to get him to Bruce in Lusaka and save him, but despite our best efforts we couldn't find a plane heading to Lusaka that could take him and he would not have survived the six hour journey by road.
A day later, Calvin Karnezos, a farmer in Mkushi got in touch to say he was flying to Lusaka and would be happy to take the eagle with him. We quickly secured permission to move him with the Department of National Parks and Wildlife and drove over to Calvin's. An hour or so later we arrived and loaded him safely onto the plane.
We said our farewells and they took off towards Lusaka where Bruce was waiting at the airport to take the eagle straight into surgery.

Sadly our story doesn’t have a happy ending. By the time the eagle was on the operating table, he was very weak and soon after pain relief and antibiotics were administered, he died. Tommy Azinga, the vet who worked on him said infection had already set in and that it was was sadly too long after the injury had happened for him to have a chance of saving his life.

It was tough to get the call from Bruce, but we knew we’d done everything we possibly could to try and save him and we’d learned a great deal doing it. It was an incredible prvilege to be so close to such an amazing bird.

We are so grateful to Bruce Woods for all his advice, Calvin Karnezos for flying the eagle to Lusaka, Ashish Patel for assisting with DNPW and Tommy Azinga, the vet who did all he could to save the eagle.