08/09/2026
On June 28, 2017, clam harvesters in the Bay of Fundy watched a bald eagle swimming through open water, wings pulling forward in a breast-stroke motion, body low, clearly exhausting itself. Angela Corbett and two others motored toward it because they believed it would die if they did not. They pulled it aboard and wrapped it in jackets and sweaters to dry the waterlogged feathers. They thought its wing was broken.
It was not. At the Cobequid Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre near Truro, Nova Scotia, caregivers examined the eagle and found something else. The toes on its right foot were missing. The foot ended where the toes should have started, healed over, old enough that skin and tissue had long closed around the stumps. Cobequid staff called it highly unusual and suspected a trapping injury from years earlier.
The eagle was otherwise healthy. Full weight. Functional feathers. Able to fly. It had been living in the wild with one working foot.
A bald eagle hunts with its feet. The talons generate roughly 400 pounds per square inch of grip force, enough to punch through a salmon's skull or lock onto a duck mid-flight. An eagle missing the toes on one foot has lost half its ability to catch, hold, and kill prey. It can still fly. It can still spot a fish from a thousand feet. It can still dive. But the grab at the end of the dive is a one-footed catch every time. Every perch is a one-footed balance. Every meal depends on the remaining foot doing work that two are supposed to share.
How long the eagle had been managing this is unknown. The healed condition of the injury meant it was old. The bird's weight was normal, which means it had been feeding itself with half a grip long enough that its body showed no deficit.
The swimming was probably what brought everything to a head. Bald eagles end up in open water after diving for a fish too heavy to lift. The talons lock reflexively on contact and do not release voluntarily. An eagle that grabs a ten-pound fish with one functioning foot has less margin to judge whether it can carry the weight. If the fish pulls it under, the eagle swims. The breast-stroke the harvesters filmed is documented in other eagles that ended up in the water after failed catches. Most make it to shore. This one was in open water in the Bay of Fundy and running out of strength when the boat reached it.
Corbett said they felt strongly they had to help. The video shows the eagle pulling forward, stalling, pulling again, lower in the water each time. The harvesters reached it before the last stroke.
Cobequid released the eagle quickly. Their policy is to minimize captivity for animals that can survive on their own. The eagle had already answered the survival question before it hit the water. Whatever a bald eagle with one foot does differently to feed itself along the Nova Scotia coast, this one had been doing it long enough and well enough that the only reason anyone found out about the missing toes was because a fish dragged it into the Bay of Fundy and three clam harvesters decided it was worth getting wet for.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: National Geographic / Cobequid Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre / Caters News / Angela Corbett.
