Juneau District Attorney James Scott said his office would have “screened out” the case against 39-year-old Kathleen Adair, but he learned the Alaska Wildlife Troopers already cited her for “hindering lawful trapping.” He relied on court rules pertaining to prosecutorial discretion to dismiss the misdemeanor criminal case.
“Her actions in saving the eagle were laudable,” Scott told Juneau District Court Judge Thomas Nave during Adair’s arraignment Thursday afternoon. “She should not have to run the risk of a conviction on her record for this offense.”
“When she’s hiking and she comes across an eagle in a snare, I encourage her to rescue that eagle again, and I will screen that case out as well,” the district attorney added.
The court ruling came as a relief to Adair, who went into the courtroom Thursday with several friends, her husband and one anonymous supporter by her side.
“The whole thing’s been kind of ridiculous in a way to start with, so I wasn’t too surprised,” she told the Empire after Nave dismissed the case without objection. “This was definitely the outcome I was hoping for.”
Adair said she was hiking Davies Creek Trail near Echo Cove at the end of the road with three dogs on Christmas Eve to check out the trail’s conditions. She was supposed to lead a hike with the Alpine Club three days later and wanted to see if they would need snowshoes.
About a mile and three-quarters inland, she found an eagle caught in a trap that was intended to catch fur-bearing animals. The bird had one foot caught in one leg-hold trap, and its other foot caught in another.
“I think it had stepped in one trap — and these traps are connected to trees with chains — so it had rolled around and had this chain tightly wound around its leg,” she said, “and then it stepped in another trap, so that chain was around it a little bit, too.”
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| The bird was so injured it had to be euthanized |
Adair’s first thought was to call the Juneau Raptor Center, which could respond to the scene with the proper tools and equipment to release the eagle. She didn’t think there would be time for that.
“I was two miles from the very end of the road, and I think it was about 1:30 in the afternoon,” she said. “So by the time I hike back, it’d be dark, and by the time I drove back, an hour past dark. I knew they wouldn’t be able to get out there until the next day, and the eagle’s best chance was for me to try to take it out then.”
Adair tied up the dogs, took pictures of the bird in the trap, placed a cloth bag over its head and wrapped it in a towel to keep it calm, then got to work. It took about an hour to release the bird from the traps, which she said were so strong she couldn’t even push one side down with both hands to release the jaws.
“I had to actually stand on two sides of it while holding the eagle up out of the way and bounce up and down a little bit to get it to open at all,” she said, recounting the tale in the courthouse lobby. “As soon as I bounced it enough to open, I shoved a stick in there to hold that open so I could get the eagle out. It wasn’t very pleasant for the eagle, I don’t think.”
Adair knew right away when she first saw the eagle that it was in bad shape. One of its legs was almost completely severed and only skin was holding it together. The other — a later trip to the veterinarian showed — was broken.
Once the eagle was released, she put it inside her backpack and hiked back to the trailhead with her dogs. On the way back, she saw a trap up in a tree, five feet off the ground, which she ignored since it did not pose a safety risk. But there was another trap on the ground about five feet off the trail, which she said she sprang by putting a stick in it, partly for her dogs’ safety and partly because she was leading a group of people on that trail in a few days
“That’s apparently the trap they were charging me for,” she said. “But I feel like the eagle was very material to all that too.”
As soon as she had cell phone service, Adair called the Juneau Raptor Center and met up with one of the bird rehabilitators. The caregiver, Scot Tiernan, prepared to send the eagle to Sitka, which has a more advanced rehabilitation facility, but took it to a local vet’s office first for X-rays and splints for its legs.
Tiernan told the Empire in an earlier interview that unfortunately, he and the vet agreed the eagle’s injuries were too severe to save the bird. They euthanized it that afternoon. Tiernan then contacted the raptor specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which sent its carcass to a repository near Denver, Colorado, so its parts can be used in Native American ceremonies.
The series of events didn’t end there, although Adair said she thought that was the end of it.
“They said they’d take care of Fish and Wildlife and whoever else, so I figured I was done with it all,” she said.
But when she led her hiking group three days later on the same trail, she sprung another trap that she deemed a safety concern. She also saw a trapper checking his traps.
“I think when he saw a trap sprung — and he didn’t know an eagle had been in there so the traps that the eagle had been in had been all sprung — and he just assumed that Alpine Club had been out there doing this.”
The trapper called the Alaska Wildlife Troopers to report someone had tampered with his traps, which is a criminal misdemeanor offense that can be punishable by up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine.
Troopers apparently never received a call from the Juneau Raptor Center or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and were unaware the case involved an eagle being rescued, Alaska Wildlife Trooper Aaron Frenzel said.
Troopers began investigating and interviewed Adair, who told them about the eagle rescue and was candid about all the traps she set off. They cited her a few days later on Jan. 10.
In an interview with the Empire on Thursday, Frenzel said the citation did not pertain to the traps set off during the eagle rescue but to the traps set off on the hike back to the trailhead and three days later.
“Ms. Adair was never cited for the incident with the eagle close to two miles up the trail,” he said. “It’s what occurred afterwards, setting off traps, and then three days after that, setting off more traps. That’s what the citation was regarding. It was up to the DA’s office to go forward with this case, and in this case they chose not to. So we felt we charged appropriately and the DA’s office felt different, and that’s where it lays.”
Frenzel said it’s not lawful to set off anyone’s traps, and that if people think a trap is set unlawfully or poses a safety risk, then they should call the troopers to handle it.
“If an individual’s lawfully trapping, there truly is no reason anybody can go in there and set off traps,” he said. “There is no lawful way of doing that. The appropriate thing to do is if a person out there sees trap that they feel are illegal, or even if they find an animal in one, they should be contacting us. Even if it’s an eagle or something, contact us. We’ll go out and do the investigation, look into it. But it’s not something for the public to go into, and by going into it, they’re putting themselves and their animals into danger potentially.”
Frenzel noted that the trapper would not be in trouble for killing the eagle.
“Not by us, no,” he said, adding that the traps were set lawfully. “It’s an incidental catch.”
In addition to lauding Adair for the rescue, DA Scott also lauded the troopers for doing a “fantastic job of enforcing the laws.” He also implored Adair to follow the laws in the future, saying he heard that she plans on setting off more traps.
Adair told the Empire she has not intention of breaking the law and she’s not “an ecoterrorist trying to ruin trappers’ livelihood.”
“I grew up hunting and fishing here, I’ve got several animal skins on my walls,” she said. “I don’t personally trap, and I don’t choose to, I don’t want to, but I’m not going to stop someone else from doing it. I only object when the traps are on the trail where I think they are safety concerns.”
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| Adair says she has no problem with trappers. This is what traps do to animals. |
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| Traps and snares are inhumane and should be outlawed. Why is it ok for a coyote, eagle, beaver, raccoon or skunk to suffer like this but we get outraged when we see someone's dog caught in one? |
Trapping in Juneau is prohibited within one-quarter mile of some major hiking trails, but Davies Creek is not one of them. (It’s also prohibited in the Mendenhall Valley, within the Mendenhall Glacier Recreational area, the Mendenhall Wetlands State Game Refuge and within one-half mile of any public or private street, road or right of way in the borough.) Adair said she would like that to be changed in the future.
“That trail’s becoming pretty popular, a lot of people hike on it,” she said of Davies Creek. “I mean, our group of 10 was there that day and there was a separate hiking group of nine people on that same day and who knows what other individuals — and that’s just the organized groups that happened to be there on that one day. So it’s getting a bit too popular to have big traps.”
She added, “The trap the eagle was in, if I had been in the trap myself I wouldn’t have been able to get out. I had to bounce up and down on both feet to open it, so I feel like they are a hazard, and not just to dogs.”
(Juneau Empire - Jan 23, 2015)
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