A bald eagle broke through a home's window earlier this month in the Southeast Alaska community of Petersburg, in what an expert calls a rare incident.
Teri Toland was preparing breakfast on the morning of June 7 when she heard a loud crash. When she walked out of her kitchen, she found a full-grown eagle in her living room. The eagle had crashed through a nearby double-paned window, shattering the glass.
Toland was used to seeing eagles fly around her house; she even enjoyed watching them race through the nearby trees, but they’d never come inside before.
This eagle had also brought something extra: an orange rockfish that it left on the carpet alongside shards of glass.
“I couldn’t walk out because there was glass all over the place,” Toland said. “And so I just started screaming for my husband.”
Once Toland’s husband came inside, he helped move the eagle to their back porch. They called the police. Unfortunately, the eagle died soon after, and a federal biologist came and picked it up.
“It was bad enough that it lost its life. I felt really bad about that,” she said.
Toland said that while she was sad that the eagle didn’t survive, she also felt lucky nobody was in the living room. The eagle came through her window fast, and the flying shards of glass could have hurt someone.
Jennifer Cedarleaf is the avian director at the Alaska Raptor Center in Sitka. The center rehabilitates injured birds, many of which are bald eagles. She said that an eagle crashing through a window is a pretty rare occurrence in Alaska.
“I’ve worked here 30 years, and in that 30 years I think we’ve had three eagles that went through windows,” Cedarleaf said.
She said that in the few crashes she’s seen, the eagle is usually carrying a fish. That matches the incident at Toland’s house.
“Eagles are big scavengers and they don’t like to put a lot of effort into hunting, but they will put a lot of effort into chasing another eagle that already has a piece of fish in its talons,” she said. “So when they’re chasing each other, they tend to not pay attention to where they’re going, and a lot of times that’s when it happens.”
Sometimes eagles can survive a crash, and sometimes they don’t. Cedarleaf said that it depends on how hard an eagle hits a window. Eagles are big animals: males can be up to 10 pounds, while females can be up to 14 pounds.
If an eagle does crash into your home, there are professionals in Petersburg who are trained to handle the birds safely. Though Cedarleaf said that if there is a situation where an eagle really needs to be moved in order to help it, people are allowed to pick it up.
“So if there was a really sick eagle and it needed to come to us, a lot of people think they can’t touch it and they shouldn’t touch it, you can pick it up as long as you are trying to get it to help. So, like to a veterinarian or send it over to the Raptor Center,” she said.
She still wouldn’t recommend touching an eagle.
“I wouldn’t touch the bird,” she said. “You have to be very careful of their talons — their feet are very strong, and that’s their main weapon.”
There are a lot of products that homeowners can put up in their windows to make them more visible, but Cedarleaf said they’re primarily for smaller birds. She said that if an eagle isn’t looking where it’s going, making windows easier to see probably won’t help.
Since these kinds of crashes are rare, Cedarleaf said that homeowners shouldn’t be too concerned about any unexpected visits from an eagle.