American Cyborg: The bird of prey was slowly starving to death after a poacher shot her upper beak off three years ago. But thanks to a team of volunteers an artificial beak has been attached to the 15-pound eagle helping her to grasp food.
Jane Fink Cantwell who found the bird scrounging for food and slowly starving at a landfill in Alaska said: "A bullet had to be removed from her curved upper beak, leaving her tongue and sinuses exposed, with a stump useless for grasping food. Eating with her beak was like using one chopstick. She also had trouble drinking and couldn't preen her feathers."
Despite the success of the operation, the bird will never be released back into the wild because she has spent too much time with humans and the final beak will not be strong enough to tear flesh from prey.
Wow, I don't know who in their right mind would shoot a bald eagle...
A real bullet is strong enough to blow the whole dang thing off, so it was probably some dipshit with a pellet gun.
If you're gonna shoot something, shoot to kill.
Or a .22. Or even a 9mm. Or any number of smaller calibers.
Bullets aren't unstoppable forces of eternal death. They have limits.
So I base that assumption on the fact that an eagles beak isn't that big. If a 9mm round got "stuck" in the beak, the beak would've been completely gone. A 22 is possible, but from a very very long distance or if they were shooting 22short or 22colibri. A 22 has enough velocity to penetrate quite a few things, the problem is that its just small enough and low powered enough that it wouldn't usually cause a wound large enough to kill much more than a prarie dog. You can shoot a coyote with a 22 and it'll be able to run away... Also, just FYI, you can kill a cow with a 32ACP round if you shoot it in the head. Having some experience with beakery, I really don't think it was a conventional bullet, but we'll have to wait till they publish the expanded version...
I'm willing to bet that the number of yards to the eagle had 3 digits in it, which makes a pretty big difference.
I'm basing this on the fact that eagles aren't THAT small (note that CyberBeak can't even rip flesh properly), and pellets have a terribly tiny amount of destructive power.
Maybe you're spending a little too much time analyzing this "problem."
Eagle hurt by one human. Other humans help. That's awesome. I hope this does not lead to adamantite claws and beaks and Wolvereagles.
Seriously though, I'm with you on shoot to kill, but unless it was a threat or they planned to eat the eagle, it shouldn't have been shot in the first place.
Since shooting an eagle is a federal offense, it's plausible that the shooter was aiming at something else and didn't even see the bird. Especially if, as speculated below, the eagle was a considerable distance away.
That should read "as speculated above". My visualization fu is weak.
I, for one, welcome our... oh wait, weren't we done with that joke?