MELISSA BLOCK, host:
An uncovered dump truck full of fish guts was just too tempting for dozens of bald eagles in Kodiak, Alaska. They swarmed the truck outside a cannery on Friday, diving into the open bed to feed, and many of them died in the frenzy. The eagles that survived have been cleaned up and are recovering.
Gary Wheeler is manager of the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge. He says a bystander reported seeing one slime-covered eagle at the cannery. But when his staff showed, they got a surprise, 50 birds buried in the mess.
Mr. GARY WHEELER (Manager, Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge): As the feeding frenzy occurred, eagles were piling on top of eagles and pressing these birds down into the fish waste. And there was about two feet of fish guts in the back of this dump truck, and so some of the birds were submerged in this waste and probably breathed in this fish waste and essentially ended up drowning.
BLOCK: Goodness. And then your job, then, is to get the live ones out. How do you do that?
Mr. WHEELER: Well, we had a lot of assistance from the cannery workers. They pulled the truck back inside the plant and basically sorted the living from the dead. And we set up several large tubs of warm water and tried to quickly clean up the survivors and get them warmed up.
BLOCK: The risk there would be that it was so cold that they couldn't moderate their own temperature?
Mr. WHEELER: That's correct, yeah. We had outside temperatures of about 10 degrees or so, and a fairly strong wind as well. So, we needed to get them inside where it was warm, get as much of the oil off of them as we could, and keep them in a warm environment.
BLOCK: Have you ever done anything like this on this scale before?
Mr. WHEELER: No, not really. I think the last time folks in Kodiak have had to deal with an incident of this magnitude was the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
BLOCK: Hmm. Mr. Wheeler, what was the total number of eagles who died?
Mr. WHEELER: We had 20 birds that died in this incident.
BLOCK: And the survivors? I take it you're flying them to Anchorage. What are they going to do there?
Mr. WHEELER: There's a care facility in Anchorage called the Bird Treatment and Learning Center. And so they will be giving these birds probably several washes and rinses and then keeping them at the facility of - for enough time for the birds to naturally get their feathers re-oiled and build up the feather insulation factor.
BLOCK: Hmm. You know, this dump track was uncovered, was outside the cannery there. Would there be a fine, a penalty, any sort of punishment for the cannery for leaving that truck exposed like that?
Mr. WHEELER: Well, I think that remains to be seen. Clearly, the birds are protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. So they are a protected species, definitely, and we'll be working through that whole situation.
BLOCK: That's Gary Wheeler, manager of the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge. He says once those eagles that survived recover in Anchorage, some of them may be released on the mainland; the others will head back to Kodiak.