Flying Free

The day the female golden eagle was shot, Dan True was watching her nest from his blind. Driven to do something---anything---he rescued the two eggs she was sitting and transferred them to the nest of a neighbor’s hen. And he was there, excited as an expectant father, when one of them hatched!

At first, he was reluctant to take on the job of eagle raising but the local federal game agent persuaded him to do it as an experiment to prove or disprove what many ornithologists claimed: that a people-raised bird---and imprinted bird---could not be returned to a normal life in the wild.

So begins the extraordinary tale of Lucy the eagle and her unusual relationship with Dan True. True acceded to the demands of the hungry eaglet, providing her food even as he worried that his interference might somehow affect the bird’s passage into adult life in the wild. His efforts to teach Lucy self-sufficiency intensified when he learned she had been earmarked for a Midwestern zoo and would spend the rest of her life in captivity.

The bird began to fly father away, to be gone longer, but always she returned. Then one day Dan sensed she was close to the time she could make it without him, to the day she would fly free.

FLYING FREE, a remarkable nature story written with humor and enthusiasm, will take its place alongside other classic accounts of the touching bond between humans and animals.

Literatura Estrangeira