OUTDOORS: On wings of eagles

If you were one of the more than 1,200 people from 24 states and four Canadian provinces who attended the release of five bald eagles Wednesday at Berkeley Plantation, you caught quite a show.

And you saw some birds set free, too.

Sure, it was amazing to watch four out of the five immature bald eagles take to the sky over the James River, soaring into lives that may reach 25 years, lives they probably wouldn't have been able to lead without the enormous help of many dedicated wildlife professionals. But just as intriguing was the gathering itself — the gathering of "Eagle Nation."

If you're a football fan familiar with "Raider Nation," you're on the way to understanding Eagle Nation. If not, let's just say their passion would impress a Tea Partier at a debt-ceiling debate.

Part of the reason for that is that three of the birds released weren't just any eagles. They were celebrities, or, as Ed Clark, President of the Wildlife Center of Virginia, called them Wednesday — "rock stars."

Those three were the hatchlings recently orphaned when their mother was hit by an airplane landing at Norfolk International Airport. They became "rock stars" this spring when hundreds of thousands of people all over the world watched live on a webcam as they hatched at the Norfolk Botanical Garden.

"We had 5 million hits the month they hatched," said Julia Dixon, media relations coordinator for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, which hosted the webcam.

And when the game department decided those eagles wouldn't all survive with just their father feeding them, they called in Clark and the Wildlife Center to care for them until they could be released into the wild.

That's when Eagle Nation, or at least some of its citizens, got a little unhinged.

"When the mother was killed there was this national cry of anguish," Clark said. Some wanted the birds to be left to the father, others wanted to leave food out themselves for the birds.

"We have gotten hate mail from people. . . [saying] we are terrible people and we hate animals."

This is the Wildlife Center of Virginia, one of the leading research and rehabilitation centers for animals in America. What's left on your crazy-to-do list once you've accused them of mistreating animals?

"They're nice people and motivated people," Clark said, of Eagle Nation, "but they're very single-minded. A whole lot of these folks are extremely passionate about these birds, but their perspective is very narrow. They have all these romantic notions about what ought to be."

When the birds arrived at the center, employees set up a webcam and chatroom for eagle lovers to follow their progress. When Clark first went onto the chatroom, he found 16,000 people logged in. In the first week, the volume of eagle oglers watching the eaglets night and day crashed the Wildlife Center's website and the server of the phone company hosting the site.

On Wednesday, the eaglet affixed with a tracking transmitter got overheated and landed in a field near the crowd. It was clearly stressed, Clark said, but perfectly healthy. It just needed some time to calm down before flying away. Of course, that wasn't going to happen "with 1,000 of its closest friends" around.

So now the bird is back at the center, and Clark is fielding "nastygrams" from people who think the bird can't fly because of the transmitter. "The fact is it had nothing to do with the tracker. It had everything to do with the people [gathering around it]."

Clark has also seen the incredibly positive power of Eagle Nation.

"Some of these folks, the majority of them, have become truly loyal friends of the wildlife center," he said. "This has been a net gain by orders of magnitude."

Since the rock star eaglets arrived, the center has increased its donor pool by a third, accepted donations for thousands upon thousands of dollars and won two separate grants, through online voting contests dominated by Eagle Nation, for more than $200,000.

More importantly, in Clark's eyes, it is that because Eagle Nation is so large and geographically diverse, he and his colleagues have been able to expand their footprint greatly.

"Through this one set of eagles, we've taught them about the issues that affect all eagles. They learned about the wildlife center and the other work we do," he said. "It's been a huge opportunity. It is through the eagle community that we are reaching the world."