MEDINA, Ohio - Two weeks ago, the future looked bleak for a bald eagle chick rescued from a fallen nest near Vermilion.

A violent thunderstorm knocked the nest out of a tree near Bank Road on May 31. One of the eagle chicks drowned. The other was discovered soaking wet and in poor condition perched on the nest. Its parents were gone.

Lorain County game officials captured the weakened chick, estimated at four to five weeks old, and rushed it to the Medina Raptor Center in Spencer Township, where Laura Jordan went to work doing what she does best: nursing to health wounded hawks, owls, falcons, eagles and other birds.

"We dried him off, gave him fluids, checked for broken bones and kept him warm for the night," Jordan recalled. "Then we started the process of trying to figure out how to get him back out into the wild."

That's when Jordan's eagle rescue got complicated.

Ideally, Jordan would have called a state-certified tree-climber to place the eaglet into an active nest with other chicks, with the expectation that the adults would adopt it as their own and raise it until it fledged.

Over the past two weeks, the eaglet has grown bigger and stronger at the Medina Raptor Center.

But there were problems. With bald eagles removed from the federal endangered species list and no longer being banded, the Ohio Division of Wildlife had stopped certifying tree-climbers. Also, monitoring of active eagle nests has been reduced to the point where the exact ages of eaglets often are unknown.

Jordan's eaglet was younger than the majority of other eaglets in the state, she said. All of the other active nests held older chicks that were already flapping their wings, climbing on branches and almost ready to fly and leave the nest, she said.

"This little guy was still needing some motherly help and not ready to take off," Jordan said.

She feared the larger eaglets might cause their adopted younger brother to follow them before he was strong enough to fly and survive outside the nest. Or worse yet, they might eat their little brother, she said.

By the time Jordan found a certified climber at the Cleveland MetroParks, it was too late. The climber checked out a nest in a towering sycamore on private property near Gates Mills, but he was concerned.

"The nest was too high in the tree, about 80 feet up," said Harvey Webster, director of wildlife resources at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. "We felt there was a significant risk the youngsters would bail out of the nest before they were ready."

When the eaglet arrives at the American Eagle Foundation in Tennessee, it will be fed by an eagle-head puppet in a hacking tower until it is ready to be released into the wild.

But the tale of the orphaned eaglet has a happy ending, Jordan said.

Next Thursday, Jordan will pack up the young bird for a trip to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. It's a region rich with bald eagles near the Dollywood amusement park in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, and home to the American Eagle Foundation, she said.

The foundation's naturalists raise eagle chicks by a process called hacking, which involves raising the birds in enclosed towers, feeding them with eagle-head puppets to prevent imprinting on their human keepers, then releasing the hacked birds into the wild.

Jordan said the foundation has an impressive success rate, hacking an average of a dozen eagles a year. After the eagles leave the hacking tower they continue to return to be fed until they learn to hunt on their own. The birds are outfitted with transmitters so they can be located if they experience problems.