Through sleigh-of-hand by his keepers, a bald eagle at a wildlife sanctuary who was trying to hatch a rock is now a dad.
They slipped a baby eaglet into his pen, and naturally an eagle who doesn’t know a rock from an egg thinks the eaglet is his hatchling, and is feeding it and looking after it (see story here).
This is a win-win. The eagle gets his hatchling, and the eaglet gets a foster parent. If they didn’t know each other before, they do now.
But what happens when the eaglet is ready to fly? The story I heard, don’t know how true it is, goes that Pop Eagle looks at the nest, then at the ground, then at the eaglets, then — thump — kicks them out of the nest and says something like, “Fly or die!” and if they fly before hitting the ground, “Go find your own hunting territory,” and runs them off.
Next spring, same thing, all over again. It seems to work. Not trying to hatch rocks, I’m not referring to that.
Related story: Read what Ben Franklin said about bald eagles here.