BATON ROUGE — A young bald eagle was sent back to the wild Friday morning thanks to the efforts of LSU's School of Veterinary Medicine's Wildlife Hospital.

Hospital members and students of the school let the bird go back into the wild after two and a half months of rehabilitation.

"This was a juvenile eagle. This bird would've been born this past season so it's less than half a year old. And she was found down and basically very wet. They weren't sure where her nest was, but she was down for several days," hospital director Mark Mitchell said.

The hospital found the bald eagle weak and injured in a wet area in late May. They brought her in for treatment and found out she had multiple issues with her blood.

"She was very anemic. Her red blood cell numbers were very low, and she was hypernatremic, so she had low sodium, something we don't usually worry about in Louisiana, we usually worry about the other side of that," Mitchell said.

The eagle was very young, not even a year old. It wasn't her usual habitat of swamps and bodies of water, but the eagle did have a friend with her.

"We actually housed her with another eagle and they got along really well. We took that time to exercise her and make sure she could do an L-turn, which is really important for them in the wild," veterinary student Sonni Tarver said.

This was their seventh release of a bald eagle this year, a new record for the school.

They brought her out in a large cage, placing it down in front of the Mississippi River levee. When they opened her cage, she was a little confused about what to do and stayed inside.

After the students tipped her box a little and turned her around, she figured it out and started flying away.

"Like all the cases we have here at the wildlife hospital, it goes from the Good Samaritans to the state biologists for the Wildlife and Fisheries. The veterinary students and then the doctors working in the wildlife hospital all working together to be able to do this," Mitchell said.

The hospital says they plan on releasing another bald eagle they have been treating before the year is out.