Inside Freedom II's slow road to flying over Paulson Stadium

A tradition that began with a vulture

The live-eagle flight has the best origin story of any mascot I know. At a 1990 playoff game, a TV announcer saw a bird circling the stadium and took it for a bald eagle. It was a turkey vulture. University President Kyle Marrero traced the tradition back to that moment at a 2025 statue dedication, along with alumnus Harry Matthews' vision and the work of falconer Steve Hein, which led to the Center for Wildlife Education in 1997.

Before any bird flew, there was Glory, a female bald eagle unable to fly who appeared at university events, including three national championship games, according to the program's recorded history. Then came Freedom, a male rescued in Maitland, Florida, with a permanent beak injury. The university dates his first flight at Paulson Stadium to 2006. For nearly two decades he launched from the press box before home games and glided down to Hein's gloved arm at midfield. Freedom died on March 29, 2025, and the 2025 season went without a pregame flight.

Who Freedom II is

She is a female southern bald eagle, also rescued in Maitland. Experts at the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey found she had West Nile virus when she was less than a year old, weak and unable to sustain flight, and the illness damaged nerves that affected her vision, according to Georgia Southern Athletics. After she recovered, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service entrusted her to the university's Center for Wildlife Education.

Hein spent years on trust-building and behavior work with no guarantee she would ever fly for a crowd. Then a re-evaluation in April 2025 found that the damage to her optic nerves had mended. She was cleared for flight. Of all the facts in this story, that one made me happiest: a bird written off as a display eagle, given a second career by her own healing.

Her public debut came on November 15, 2025, during a military appreciation game against Coastal Carolina. Hein presented her at midfield after the first quarter, the Statesboro Herald reported, and Georgia Southern won 45-40. She did not fly that night, and that was the plan.

Why there is still no date

A stadium flight is not a trick an eagle learns on a lawn. It means launching from high on the press box, over roughly 25,000 people and a marching band, and landing on one person's arm. The AJC's reporting describes Freedom II in her second year of flight training, with no maiden flight scheduled, and it put Hein's rule in its headline: "patience trumps deadlines." Hein, who has practiced falconry for decades, wants the stadium to become a familiar part of her world before she flies in it.

That caution strikes me as exactly right. A rushed first flight could frighten a young bird for good, and the whole point of the tradition is a calm eagle choosing to come back to the glove.

Where you can see her now

Freedom II appears at campus events and games, and the university said the next phase of her training would put her on public display at the Center for Wildlife Education on the Statesboro campus. WTOC noted that university staff had worked with her for several years before that point. A bronze statue of the original Freedom was unveiled at a ceremony outside Bishop Field House on September 12, 2025, and the university invited fans to take photos with it.

Her story sits inside a bigger one about a program that learned to make do, told in our history of Georgia Southern football. When she does fly, it will be a tradition that started with a mistaken vulture finally getting its real eagle back.