By Matthew Randazzo For Peninsula Daily News
EDITOR’S NOTE — Jaye Moore, owner of the Northwest Raptor & Wildlife Center in Sequim, has loved wildlife all her life, especially birds of prey.
Licensed through Washington state and the federal government, she takes in injured, orphaned or abandoned wildlife.
State, county and city agencies have her number and know that she is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (She can be reached at 360-681-2283.)
This story is by Matthew Randazzo, who is writing “Mother Nature,” a book about Moore.
SEQUIM — Jaye Moore began to unlock the language of bald eagles on April Fools’ Day, 1996.
That morning, she was called by the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office to a Sequim duck pond tightly circled by an electrified livestock fence.
A soaking-wet bald eagle was tangled in this fence, and a fat duck dangled from his talons.
She was there for the eagle, who we remember today by the name of Freddie.
Jaye, a tiny mother of two, was armed only with a blanket when she fearlessly took hold of Freddie’s bone-crushing talons — and instantly lost hold of her senses.
The fence was still juiced.
The moment Jaye touched Freddie, she was blasted with the 10,000 volts of direct current that had been continuously coursing through his wet body.
Once freed from the fence, Freddie was limp, fat-tongued and panting, and Jaye was feeling little better.
At the least the duck was in good shape: He hit the ground running and quacking.
After a few words with the electric fence’s owner, Jaye drove Freddie to the Northwest Raptor & Wildlife Center.
The center was and is nothing more than a collection of self-funded, hand-built structures in the Moore family’s half-acre suburban backyard in Sequim that houses injured, orphaned and ill wild animals of miscellaneous species.
For once, Jaye rehabilitated alongside a patient of the center.
She literally shared Freddie’s pain. The split-second electrocution Jaye suffered rescuing Freddie resulted in months of teeth-gritting shoulder spasms.
She knew this could only be a tiny fraction of the torment suffered by the roughly 12-pound eagle who hung wet and helpless through round after round of blinding electroshock treatments.
Jaye began by swaddling Freddie like a baby and force-feeding him medicine-laced rats and fish.
Soon, she managed to coax him to stand, to walk, to hop, to fly.
Within a couple of months, he was flying and socializing with the other eagles in the large netted enclosure known as the Flight Pen — the last test before a rehabilitated eagle is released.
On July 4, 1996, Jaye and Freddie returned to the same pond where she found him.
Kneeling down to the large kennel that held one of her closest friends, she whispered to Freddie a final goodbye.
Then, to the delight of news crews and a crowd of onlookers, Jaye and her husband, Gary, lifted the top off the kennel and set Freddie free.
Freddie barreled through the opening in a discombobulated tumble of wings and talons, slowly gaining air.
On his way to the Dungeness River, Freddie passed by a flapping American flag in a Sequim resident’s yard.
Two weeks after Freddie’s release, Jaye was visited while mowing her lawn. A light grazing tap on her head appeared to come from nowhere.
A minute later, it happened again, and this time Jaye saw the bald eagle with the electric burns on his wings flap up and away.
It was Freddie — and this was not a one-time social call.
Almost every morning from that day forward, Jaye was greeted the moment she opened the slide door to her backyard by the sound of Freddie’s happy snort from a nearby tree branch.
Breakfast with Freddie became a part of Jaye’s daily routine — Jaye enjoying her coffee as Freddie chattered away from his low branch looking over her shoulder.
This tradition continued for six years, as Freddie raised a family in two nearby nests with a mate Jaye named Wilma.
Then, in March 2002, the visits stopped.
A lead brought Jaye to a field off Seventh Street in Sequim, where she found Freddie’s talon-punctured carcass.
He was the victim of a territorial battle with another eagle — a very common death in the densely populated eagle country of the North Olympic Peninsula.
Jaye swaddled Freddie in the same blanket she first rescued him with and buried him at the center in the Flight Pen where he relearned to fly.
By traditional standards, Jaye has never lost a child, but, if you ask her, she buried one of hers in that blanket in the Flight Pen.
Jaye did not mourn alone.
A day later, Freddie’s mate, Wilma, landed atop the Flight Pen in a frenzy, screaming for her partner at the one place where he could be found if he was still alive.
She held a shrieking, mournful vigil from dawn to sundown for seven straight days.
Gradually, Wilma found comfort in the company of a stranger, a wild eagle who began to woo her down from the Flight Pen’s roof.
Nature is always in a hurry to eat and mate, but Wilma took her time. Gradually, she moved on, and the next year, she built a nest and raised chicks with this new eagle.
She also taught this new eagle some old tricks.
One morning, a groggy Jaye Moore stumbled past her slide door and heard a familiar call from a familiar branch from a familiar tree at a familiar time.
It was Freddie’s call — only it was coming out of the beak of Wilma’s new mate.
Jaye was stunned.
Here was indisputable proof of a bald eagle’s ability to memorize a complex routine and communicate it in detail to another eagle more than a year after seeing it last.
Wilma trained her new mate to give his respects to her old “mother-in-law.”
The Northwest Raptor & Wildlife Center still receives regular visits from the clever and obedient spouse we’ve dubbed Freddie Jr.
He’s a loud reminder that the animals we care for are intelligent, complex and noble creatures who deserve every sacrifice we make to give them the best possible quality of life.
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Matthew Randazzo is an author and journalist who volunteers as the public relations director of the Northwest Raptor & Wildlife Center in Sequim. You can find out more about Randazzo at MRVBooks.com and the center at Facebook.com/NorthwestRaptorCenter.
