Valor is recuperating at City Wildlife in Northeast D.C. (Photo by Kim Hodlin / City Wildlife)

Many Washingtonians have been watching baby bald eagles hatch and grow over the past few months, via an eagle cam at the National Arboretum. Thursday night, one of the 12-week-old eaglets fell from a branch and disappeared. He was missing all weekend. Monday afternoon, he was found on the streets of Northeast D.C.

The two eaglets are at the age where they’re learning to fly, getting ready to live on their own.

“The older sibling, only a couple days older, actually took flight and was flying out and coming back to the nest,” says Dan Rauch, a wildlife biologist with the District Department of Energy & Environment. The younger sibling was still learning.

“It kind of ventured out onto a branch,” says Rauch. “We could see it on video on the eagle camera lose its footing, try to recover, and then it just went off into the darkness and fell off.

The bird wasn’t hard to find — it was right under the nest. On Friday, Rauch was able to flush the bird into a nearby sweet gum tree with low branches, where it would at least be safe for the night. “There are dangers out there, there are fox, there are coyotes. I wanted to get it off the ground and then we would deal with it the next day.”

But the next day it was nowhere to be found. Rauch and others spent weekend searching for the baby eagle, named Valor, with no luck. The situation was made worse by the wet weather. The bird was waterlogged.

Finally, Monday phone calls started coming in from nearby Carver Terrace. One resident posted about it on Facebook. “I straight up just had to call animal control because there’s an injured eagle in the middle of the d*** hood. Ps those are some big a** birds.”

Rauch was nearby, and quickly made his way there, where a crowd was gathering around the eaglet on the sidewalk. “The residents were great. They were keeping an eye on it,” says Rauch.

Rauch used his bird-whispering skills to get close to the animal. “You can vocalize back to them, they do little chips back and forth in the nest,” he says. He tried to make the bird feel comfortable, and sat down a couple feet away. “I’ve caught raptors before, and the best way to do it is to get a towel over top of them. It covers the wings, it covers the head, it calms them down.” One neighbor brought an old dog crate to hold the bird until animal control officers from the Humane Rescue Alliance arrived.

Valor was transported to City Wildlife, the organization that helps injured wild animals in D.C. recover.

“One of the things we have to do here is keep animals — especially ones that are very stressy — in the most defensible and quietest place possible,” says executive director Paula Goldberg, opening the door to a back room where the fledgling is recuperating in a large kennel covered with towels. “We don’t want the bird to be frightened by sight of us, nor do we want it to become accustomed to the sight of us.”

Veterinarian Kristy Jacobus says Valor appears to be healthy. “Just seems a little bit thin,” she says. “Otherwise bright and alert. Responsive, well-muscled.” Though, she adds, “You can never really say for sure what’s going on internally.”

A fall from the nest isn’t uncommon when eagles are learning to fly. In the wild, it can be deadly. But Valor was lucky — he was on camera the whole time, and he’s likely to return to the nest (and spotlight) soon.

Valor is the seventh eagle to hatch at the nest in a tulip poplar tree at the Arboretum, near the Anacostia River. The proud eagle parents, Mr. President and The First Lady, first nested there in 2014, the first eagles to nest there since 1947. Bald eagles disappeared from the Anacostia and Potomac in the 1940s due to destruction of their habitat and DDT from pesticides contaminating their food. The eagles’ return has been an environmental success story, in D.C., and around the nation. There is another nesting pair near the District’s southern tip at the Metropolitan Police Academy.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.