Last August, Jeff and Judith Lucia were sitting on their deck perched high above Quilcene Bay, enjoying the first clear day in a while. While bird-watching through binoculars, they spotted an eagle struggling on the tidal flat far below. 

“Jeff said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but that bird is in trouble,’” Judith Lucia recalled.

The eagle was raising his wings periodically, like a cormorant, and then collapsing. The tide was coming in, and it became obvious he was going to drown.

“I can’t watch this,” Judith said.

She loaded her kayak, grabbed one of Jeff’s flannel shirts and headed down to the water. Unloading her little red kayak at the head of the bay, she saw there was just enough water for her to get out to the struggling bird. 

“Going out there, I thought, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’” she recalled, aware of her bare legs in short shorts, her lack of experience and a plan limited to a flannel shirt. “I realized I couldn’t overthink it. I just had to go with the flow.” 

When she approached the bird, it tried to swim away and got as far as the bank of the Big Quilcene River, where it fell backward into the water.  

She was able to beach her kayak nearby. 

She could tell the eagle was exhausted, and she attempted to contain it in the shirt.

The eagle was large, and it reared back with its beak open, but Judith persisted, and on the third try, she managed to wrap it in the shirt, in her arms, with its head facing forward.

“I don’t know how I did it,” she said, wonderingly. “And then I thought, ‘Now what?’”

She noticed the kayak had a hatch she had never used. She uncovered it, and there was an eagle-size hole she put the bundled bird into. 

“It fit right in, like a plug,” she said.

She motioned to Jeff, who was still watching from the deck, to meet her at the head of the bay. 

When she returned to shore, she could feel the eagle shaking. 

“It was soaking wet and hypothermic,” she said. “We knew it needed to go to the wild bird facility, but they weren’t answering the phone, so we took it to the fire hall.”

During the short drive, she held the eagle, which dug its talons into the car seat on each side of her bare thigh, while Jeff drove. When they arrived, he had to pull each talon out of the seat individually to release it. 

“It didn’t have much strength, but we lost part of the car seat,” said Jeff. 

By then, eagle lice, the size of potato bugs, were emerging.

“I was just crawling (with them),” Judith said. “That the lice were leaving was not a good sign.”

Firefighter and emergency medical technician Kevin Winn applied warm packs to the bird, the first time he treated an eagle, noting it was “impressive” to see an eagle up close.

“It was cold, so we wrapped it up and gave it some hot packs,” he recalled. 

Center Valley Animal Rescue was called, and it came down to transport the raptor.

“They couldn’t take care of it, they weren’t licensed for that, but they could take it to Wild Bird Rescue,” Judith explained. “When I called the next morning, I was sure he was dead…. We thought it was caught on a fish line or something at first, but there was no line. Something was wrong.”

Cindy Daily, founder and director of Discovery Bay Wild Bird Rescue, evaluated the eagle, judged to be 4 years old by its development and the color of its feathers. Discovery Bay Wild Bird Rescue is a Port Townsend nonprofit that treats any type of injured or sick bird and offers educational outreach opportunities.

“By the time it got here, it was warm and drying, but it was down and it was kind of just lying flat, lethargic and not feeling well,” Daily reported. “Food was still in its crop, but something was causing it to not metabolize.

“Something got him down, but he was found before he got to the starvation point. We get an awful lot of starving birds here.”

There was no sign of traumatic injury. Daily checked for lead poisoning and noticed fluid coming out of the eagle’s nose, perhaps a sign of bacterial infection. 

Once the eagle was stabilized, she took it to Dr. Cindy Alexander at Hadlock Veterinary Clinic, who prescribed a course of antibiotics.

Slowly, the eagle recovered. It was able to use the 100-foot eagle flight cage at the clinic, one of only three in the state.

“It got a little better every day, not anything spectacular,” said Daily. “Judith’s heroics are truly the story there. He would not have been able to save himself.”

Judith gave the credit to luck, saying she was “in the right place at the right time.”

“But Cindy Daily tells me, ‘Most people don’t do that,’” Judith said.

Daily explained eagles need to be in “great physical condition” before they can be released, describing them as “athletes.”

In early February, after six months of rehabilitation, the eagle was released at the Lucias’ house, with just four people present.  

“It just sat for a moment, and we reconnected. It was the greatest thing,” Judith recalled. “I said, ‘You can fly.’ And the bird took off. 

“The whole thing makes me smile, since I rescued him.”