The McKinley Eagles Get Up Close to Their Namesake
Saving Our Avian Resources (SOAR) brought a real, live bald eagle to visit the Eagles of McKinley Elementary School.
It doesn’t matter at what range you get a look at a real, live eagle. “WOW!” is what you say, the way commoners genuflect in the presence of royalty and say, “Your Majesty.”
Most of the people in the cafeteria at McKinley Elementary School on Thursday afternoon had never been as close to one as they suddenly were when they tiptoed into the room so as not to startle the one that came out especially to meet them and teach them a few things.
That’s McKinley as in the McKinley Eagles, by the way. And the special audience was by invitation only, the guest list restricted to students who’d earned an invite by virtue of their good behavior throughout the month of January. Their reward was a visit by SOAR (Saving Our Avian Resources), a non-profit organization devoted to wildlife rehabilitation, education and research. Each month the school’s Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) Committee recognizes deserving students with a special event.
Preschool teacher Sylvia Becerra remembered SOAR from a previous visit to McKinley several years ago. “Sometimes we walk over to the bridge and see eagles fishing,” she explained, “so I thought we should have SOAR come back so the kids could get a closer look.”
So Kay Newmann, the founder of SOAR, and Terrie Hoefer brought Thora the Bald Eagle, Stella the Great Horned Owl and Onyx the Peregrine Falcon in for a gasp-inducing session of Show and Tell. All three of the birds were impressive but Thora both opened and stole the show.
“She was found just standing in a field with her head drooped,” Newmann recalled. “The prognosis wasn’t good. She was lead poisoned, probably by scavenging from the carcass of a deer that was killed by a hunter using lead shot.”
But Thora rallied. Eventually her health fully restored except for one thing: tests revealed she was no longer eagle-eyed. Her vision was too impaired to return her to the wild so she has settled in as SOAR’s Big Bird, weighing in at about ten pounds with a six-foot wing span that she seemed to enjoy flashing from her perch after she’d been set aside while Stella and Onyx strutted their stuff. Occasionally Newmann was drowned out by Thora’s resonant screeches.
“Eagles have very high metabolism,” Newmann told the enthralled kids while Hoefer walked among them with eagle feathers and talons they could touch and handle. “They eat about 10% of their body weight a day, which would be like one of you eating about 50 hamburgers.”
So much for the popular connotation of the phrase “eats like a bird.”
While eagles prefer to dine on fish, falcons use their superior airspeed to pluck pigeons right out of the sky for food, the McKinley Eagles learned. And owls feast on mice, downing as many as six or seven a night. Newmann said they use their beaks to behead their prey and swallow the rest whole, eventually spitting out the indigestible parts in the form of what Newmann described as mouse mcnuggets.
Only two concerns arose from the program:
- School mascots are usually people dressed up in goofy, cartoonish outfits. Given the precedent established at McKinley what about all the schools in the district that call themselves Tigers, Lions, etc.?
- The other, more immediate issue was cleared up right away. The cafeteria staff had just finished cleaning when the birds arrived. And each in its turn did the sort of thing on the gleaming floor that’s often found on car windshields and sidewalks, stuff that brought a barely stifled mix of squeamishness and giggles from the audience. Still, when Newmann and Hoefer and their fine feathered friends took their bows everybody responded with polite sign language applause, as they’d been instructed to do to keep from spooking the stars of the show. All of the hands flapping in the air were like a roomful of wings SOARing aloft.
For more information, visit the SOAR website.
