F the F Challenge...Kodiak Survivors

My husband and I had a fun opportunity this last weekend. A friend of ours volunteers at the Anchorage Bird Treatment and Rehabilitation Center...and they needed some help! About 2 weeks ago out in Kodiak, Alaska, 18 bald eagles drowned and 32 more were injured. They were the victims of an error that a seafood processing company made - they had a load of fish remains in the back of a huge truck and they pulled out of the warehouse without covering the load. The eagles immediately saw this as a feeding opportunity and dove in. literally, to the back of the truck. 18 sank and drowned before the truck driver realized what was happening and dumped the load. One died as the result of hypothermia after someone there attempted to clean the eagle but did not get it out of the weather. The surviving eagles were flown on a jet to Anchorage where they have been staying at the BTLC ever since. A huge team of volunteers has washed (some of the birds as many as 3 times to remove oil from the fish remains), fed and cleaned up after these eagles for nearly 3 weeks now. We got to spend 4 hours on Saturday with these beautiful boys and one girl. We helped transfer them from kennels into larger pens with perches, feed them and mostly clean up lots and lots of bird doo! They are incredible birds and thanks to the volunteers at this center they will most likely be released this coming weekend after being flown back to Kodiak. The final step in the process they have begun is to re-climatize them, they have been slowly reintroducing them to the outdoors so that they get used to the cold again. We took mostly head shots of them partly because we were fascinated by the incredible beauty of their heads, beaks and eyes up that close and partly because they were in cages - seemed so sad to see such a majestic animal not able to spread its wings and fly. In the end - with the fill the frame challenge - it seems to have worked out okay. These were shot by both my husband and I.