Egu flexes her wings before her flight to freedom

Hello hello,

It's been several weeks now since I first told you about the beautiful young sea eagle that had come to be at Animal Tracks with a broken leg and battered wing. I'm so pleased to tell you that she’s making wonderful progress.

It turns out that our beautiful bird is a girl and she's fondly known to us all as Egu.

The female of the species is larger than the male and Egu's grown to be absolutely huge as you can see. She's certainly a lot happier than she was at first, and if a bird could smile she'd be grinning!

Egu's broken bones are now fully healed, her feathers grown back and all that remains is to improve on her general fitness and most importantly ensure she is able to fly and make the transition back to the wild where she belongs.

The Animal Tracks team and especially Nikhil, the brilliant vet and orthopaedic expert who pieced this broken bird back together, are now getting her ready for release back into the wild. She needs to gain strength in order to lift off into the air and soar high with the other sea eagles that we are so lucky to have living and nesting here in Goa. I often watch them with envy as they glide and swoop overhead.

So at last lovely Egu is learning how to be an eagle. She arrived at the IAR centre as a fledgling and so probably has no airborne experience whatsoever - other than her first fall from on high and the resulting injuries that brought her to Animal Tracks.

After months of slow and patient recuperation it is obvious how much she loves the heat of the sun on her feathers, stretching and flexing her healed leg and gently fanning the warm air beneath her enormous wings.

Little by little she is flying short distances, but the effort soon exhausts her and she makes it known when she is ready to go back into her quarters for a rest and some fish.

But I know everyone is optimistic that before too long our magnificent bird will return to take her place in the wild, soaring high up on the thermals with her own kind. Hopefully she'll meet a mate and have her own chicks to care for... let's hope they have a more successful first flight than their mother when the time comes for them to fly the nest!

Bye for now!

Olive x