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On the Hunt for Appalachia's Secretive Golden Eagles
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Deepest winter in Highland County, Virginia’s “Little Switzerland” with one of the lowest populations of any county east of the Mississippi. The sky is a screaming sapphire, so deeply immortally blue as to nearly hurt the eyes. A foot of snow, thinly veiled with an icy hide that amplifies its purity, bounces the sunrays back up to us as we walk along a rural road in the Blue Grass Valley—a welcome aura of warmth given the 28F temperature, though more observed than actually sensed. There’s absolutely no wind, which subdues the chill but makes the subtle crunch of our boots on the dirt road sound jarring and disrespectful in the ringing silence.
We’re scanning the skies for golden eagles—yes, golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), the same tawny apex predators we usually associate with the mesas and sagebrush prairies of the arid West. But there is a small and genetically invaluable population of goldens migrating annually from Quebec down the spine of the Southern Appalachians, a few thousand winter warriors spending their snowy season in our upland forests and pastures, far to the east of most of their kin.
Since the last ice age the Appalachian mountain range, the only significant and connected high-elevation landscape in the South, has afforded what scientists call a “microclimate” more typical of regions much further north, an ancient, elongated and stony series of sky islands that support cold-adapted species more generally found at higher latitudes. In Highland, particularly here in the relatively flat Blue Grass Valley, much of the landscape is given over to livestock pasture, unlike the more hilly and forested topography of Bath County to the south. Like some rural areas in the Midwest and Plains states, Highlanders can boast of having more livestock—mainly sheep and cattle—than people, and it’s the same lush pasturage amid rolling hills and dales that makes this place such a promising hunting ground for aerial predators, even in the crystalline stillness of winter.
As we amble down the road, gravel and ice crunching underfoot, I look up to see far away in the aching blue three white birds slowly traversing the sky. White? I call attention to these mysteries and my friends stop to gawk through binoculars. Gulls? In the February mountains? They were so high it took a few moments for the secret to reveal itself: such was the dazzling reflection of the level snowscape about us that the sunlight was actually bouncing straight up into the undersides of the crows high above us, making them appear, to varying shimmering degrees, snow white. Impossible, but there was no way around it—the silhouette and flight pattern left no doubt, and when the trio had flown further away from us their traditionally somber coloration reasserted itself.
White crows—now we were ready for anything. But the golden eagles remained out of sight as we got back in the truck and headed further west toward the West Virginia line, where in previous searches I’d had good luck. During one profitable solo trek a few years ago I’d seen two different goldens and what I’d thought was a third. Golden eagles are distinguishable from the dark and mottled immature bald eagles they resemble by two primary points: the much larger bill of the bald (handy for tearing open thickly-scaled fishes) and the unfeathered legs of the bald (another fishing adaptation) compared to the golden’s, whose feathery boots extend to the end of the tarsus right above the “ankle,” likely an adaptation to the golden eagle’s often frigid environment.
Despite its smaller body and head and strangely buoyant manner of soaring I’d thought at a distance this third raptor was another golden, probably based on the rush I still felt from my earlier sightings. But when it abruptly glided to a halt and actually began hovering over a field I knew it was something else entirely, despite the fully feathered legs I could plainly distinguish. This was a life bird for me, another northern visitor to our elevated winter hunting grounds. The rough-legged hawk breeds in the Arctic and had come all the way down the sloping spine of the Appalachian chain to dine on our scrumptious southern mice and voles; as the name implies, the rough-legged has insulation down to its ankles like its distant cold weather cousin the golden eagle.
We got out of the truck when the road ended in a plowed hillock of muddy snow and jagged stalagmites of ice; apparently those on this side of the snowy roadblock went back the way we’d come, those on the other on into West Virginia. I stamped some feeling back into my feet, squinting into the cold and motionless sun and gesturing toward the sweeping vale to our south, where I’d previously watched eagles soaring and standing guard atop the broken branches of scattered trees. Scanning the ridge to our south I wondered at the deadly persistence, the unremitting attention to detail, that alone could eke a living out of this lunar lifelessness. No wonder bears hibernate.
But the mighty golden eagle comes here prepared. At 40 inches in length with a wingspan of seven-and-a-half feet, weighing in at a considerable 13 pounds, the golden is armed with the tools of the raptorial trade, magnified. Its talons look like a grizzly’s claws, onyx scimitars curling imperiously from pebbly yellow-scaled feet. Three toes face forward to seize and hold prey, while in the rear the heavily muscled “thumb” claw, or hallux, arched and long as an adult’s forefinger, is used to dig deep into flesh and vitals. The opportunistic golden eagle chiefly targets small-to-medium mammals, especially mice, rabbits and groundhogs, but will deftly pursue other birds—even hawks and owls—in steep dives measured at 150 miles per hour. Larger snakes and sometimes fish can be consumed in warmer months, but our Highland goldens often utilize carrion from winterkilled deer, which can have tragic consequences.
Much of the birds’ winter nourishment comes from deer that have expired over the frozen nights, but some of the first available carcasses are from animals wounded during deer season and not claimed, and it is this scavenging that poses an insidious threat to the eagles. Lead bullets fragment on impact, sending shrapnel tearing through the deer’s organs and tissues and leaving a hidden toxic hazard for scavengers feeding on the carcass, and these days responsible hunters are increasingly discovering that copper and other alternatives to lead work as well or better in taking down large game, without spreading the insidious poison of lead into the local ecosystem.
We’re mutely scanning the motionless slopes and skies before us, each wishing the others would suggest calling it quits. My thoughts went someplace warmer, to a cluster of islets off the coast of southern California that have their own eagle story to tell. The Channel Islands, eight low and rocky protrusions forming an archipelago off the coast of Santa Barbara, had long been the home of an isolated population of bald eagles hunting seabirds and fish when the DDT plague of the 1950s wiped them out. With the recovery of raptors following the ban on DDT, and with none of the more aggressive bald eagles to keep them away, golden eagles began migrating west from the mainland in the early 1990s and colonized the islands, finding easy prey in the island fox, a variant of the gray fox the size of a housecat. With no natural predators (the bald eagles out fishing and hunting gulls) these foxes had evolved to hunt during the day, making them obvious targets to the predatory newcomers. In short order the island fox’s population crashed, but in 1999 Channel Islands National Park began an admirably aggressive island fox recovery program that included the captive breeding and reintroduction of foxes, the capture and reintroduction to the mainland of the trespassing golden eagles and reestablishment of bald eagles. Again the national bird flies far and wide over the balmy Channel Islands, with not a golden eagle in sight.
Just like here in Highland County on this frigid afternoon. As we climbed numbly back into the truck (I can’t recall who gave in first) and headed home we discussed another problem this extraordinarily little group of goldens was facing. During their seasonal migration golden eagles, like all migrants that cross the continent, skillfully use spiraling thermals and geographic features like ridges to capture updrafts, allowing them to conserve vital energy. But wind turbines are being placed along the same breezy ridges that migratory birds depend upon, and a new federal emphasis on renewable energy means that more and more turbines are being planned and constructed, raising rotating 120-foot blades directly in the eagles’ flight path.
In November 2013 the Department of Justice successfully prosecuted Duke Energy under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for the killing of 14 golden eagles at a wind farm in Wyoming; the following month the Obama Administration finalized a rule legalizing the incidental killing of golden and bald eagles by wind farms over a 30-year period of operation, a decision which flies in the face of federal law and drastically heightens the likelihood of further eagle mortality.
I first spoke with Todd Katzner, now a biologist with the US Geologic Survey in Idaho, a few years ago when he was with the University of West Virginia conducting field research into the migratory patterns of our little known Appalachian clan of golden eagles, and in a recent study he has found that the groups within this subpopulation play a kind of leapfrog, with the eagles that breed in the far north commonly wintering farthest to the south, some migrating all the way to northern Alabama and Georgia. In doing so they pass over the middle groups, which journey only as far down as the central Appalachians, and leave those hardy groups stopping even further north far behind. Katzner believes this odd behavior offers all three groups different perks, with those willing to endure the winters further north or in higher elevations enjoying a shorter migration back to their Canadian breeding grounds in the spring, as well as first dibs on prime breeding territories. “Golden eagles are said to be an open-country bird” in the West, says Katzner. “But in the East they spend the winter primarily in dense deciduous forests, usually at higher elevations, like ridgetops and mountaintops. That’s tough country. Humans don’t go there very frequently, and when we get there, we can’t see very far in that habitat.”
At last—the excuse we’d been searching for all morning. Our luckless search for golden eagles under a frozen sky hadn’t been for nothing; just knowing they were here, unseen and largely unknown, going about their bloody business to survive in this alpine icebox with skills learned far to the our north. While the sky remained pellucid and empty, somewhere amid the ragged ridgelines and silent woodlands hunkered our glorious quarry, hunkered in turn over her quarry, an incautious rabbit or lethargic groundhog perhaps, or maybe a deer carcass unclaimed by a poor shot.
Let’s hope he used copper bullets.
We’re scanning the skies for golden eagles—yes, golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), the same tawny apex predators we usually associate with the mesas and sagebrush prairies of the arid West. But there is a small and genetically invaluable population of goldens migrating annually from Quebec down the spine of the Southern Appalachians, a few thousand winter warriors spending their snowy season in our upland forests and pastures, far to the east of most of their kin.
Since the last ice age the Appalachian mountain range, the only significant and connected high-elevation landscape in the South, has afforded what scientists call a “microclimate” more typical of regions much further north, an ancient, elongated and stony series of sky islands that support cold-adapted species more generally found at higher latitudes. In Highland, particularly here in the relatively flat Blue Grass Valley, much of the landscape is given over to livestock pasture, unlike the more hilly and forested topography of Bath County to the south. Like some rural areas in the Midwest and Plains states, Highlanders can boast of having more livestock—mainly sheep and cattle—than people, and it’s the same lush pasturage amid rolling hills and dales that makes this place such a promising hunting ground for aerial predators, even in the crystalline stillness of winter.
As we amble down the road, gravel and ice crunching underfoot, I look up to see far away in the aching blue three white birds slowly traversing the sky. White? I call attention to these mysteries and my friends stop to gawk through binoculars. Gulls? In the February mountains? They were so high it took a few moments for the secret to reveal itself: such was the dazzling reflection of the level snowscape about us that the sunlight was actually bouncing straight up into the undersides of the crows high above us, making them appear, to varying shimmering degrees, snow white. Impossible, but there was no way around it—the silhouette and flight pattern left no doubt, and when the trio had flown further away from us their traditionally somber coloration reasserted itself.
White crows—now we were ready for anything. But the golden eagles remained out of sight as we got back in the truck and headed further west toward the West Virginia line, where in previous searches I’d had good luck. During one profitable solo trek a few years ago I’d seen two different goldens and what I’d thought was a third. Golden eagles are distinguishable from the dark and mottled immature bald eagles they resemble by two primary points: the much larger bill of the bald (handy for tearing open thickly-scaled fishes) and the unfeathered legs of the bald (another fishing adaptation) compared to the golden’s, whose feathery boots extend to the end of the tarsus right above the “ankle,” likely an adaptation to the golden eagle’s often frigid environment.
Despite its smaller body and head and strangely buoyant manner of soaring I’d thought at a distance this third raptor was another golden, probably based on the rush I still felt from my earlier sightings. But when it abruptly glided to a halt and actually began hovering over a field I knew it was something else entirely, despite the fully feathered legs I could plainly distinguish. This was a life bird for me, another northern visitor to our elevated winter hunting grounds. The rough-legged hawk breeds in the Arctic and had come all the way down the sloping spine of the Appalachian chain to dine on our scrumptious southern mice and voles; as the name implies, the rough-legged has insulation down to its ankles like its distant cold weather cousin the golden eagle.
We got out of the truck when the road ended in a plowed hillock of muddy snow and jagged stalagmites of ice; apparently those on this side of the snowy roadblock went back the way we’d come, those on the other on into West Virginia. I stamped some feeling back into my feet, squinting into the cold and motionless sun and gesturing toward the sweeping vale to our south, where I’d previously watched eagles soaring and standing guard atop the broken branches of scattered trees. Scanning the ridge to our south I wondered at the deadly persistence, the unremitting attention to detail, that alone could eke a living out of this lunar lifelessness. No wonder bears hibernate.
But the mighty golden eagle comes here prepared. At 40 inches in length with a wingspan of seven-and-a-half feet, weighing in at a considerable 13 pounds, the golden is armed with the tools of the raptorial trade, magnified. Its talons look like a grizzly’s claws, onyx scimitars curling imperiously from pebbly yellow-scaled feet. Three toes face forward to seize and hold prey, while in the rear the heavily muscled “thumb” claw, or hallux, arched and long as an adult’s forefinger, is used to dig deep into flesh and vitals. The opportunistic golden eagle chiefly targets small-to-medium mammals, especially mice, rabbits and groundhogs, but will deftly pursue other birds—even hawks and owls—in steep dives measured at 150 miles per hour. Larger snakes and sometimes fish can be consumed in warmer months, but our Highland goldens often utilize carrion from winterkilled deer, which can have tragic consequences.
Much of the birds’ winter nourishment comes from deer that have expired over the frozen nights, but some of the first available carcasses are from animals wounded during deer season and not claimed, and it is this scavenging that poses an insidious threat to the eagles. Lead bullets fragment on impact, sending shrapnel tearing through the deer’s organs and tissues and leaving a hidden toxic hazard for scavengers feeding on the carcass, and these days responsible hunters are increasingly discovering that copper and other alternatives to lead work as well or better in taking down large game, without spreading the insidious poison of lead into the local ecosystem.
We’re mutely scanning the motionless slopes and skies before us, each wishing the others would suggest calling it quits. My thoughts went someplace warmer, to a cluster of islets off the coast of southern California that have their own eagle story to tell. The Channel Islands, eight low and rocky protrusions forming an archipelago off the coast of Santa Barbara, had long been the home of an isolated population of bald eagles hunting seabirds and fish when the DDT plague of the 1950s wiped them out. With the recovery of raptors following the ban on DDT, and with none of the more aggressive bald eagles to keep them away, golden eagles began migrating west from the mainland in the early 1990s and colonized the islands, finding easy prey in the island fox, a variant of the gray fox the size of a housecat. With no natural predators (the bald eagles out fishing and hunting gulls) these foxes had evolved to hunt during the day, making them obvious targets to the predatory newcomers. In short order the island fox’s population crashed, but in 1999 Channel Islands National Park began an admirably aggressive island fox recovery program that included the captive breeding and reintroduction of foxes, the capture and reintroduction to the mainland of the trespassing golden eagles and reestablishment of bald eagles. Again the national bird flies far and wide over the balmy Channel Islands, with not a golden eagle in sight.
Just like here in Highland County on this frigid afternoon. As we climbed numbly back into the truck (I can’t recall who gave in first) and headed home we discussed another problem this extraordinarily little group of goldens was facing. During their seasonal migration golden eagles, like all migrants that cross the continent, skillfully use spiraling thermals and geographic features like ridges to capture updrafts, allowing them to conserve vital energy. But wind turbines are being placed along the same breezy ridges that migratory birds depend upon, and a new federal emphasis on renewable energy means that more and more turbines are being planned and constructed, raising rotating 120-foot blades directly in the eagles’ flight path.
In November 2013 the Department of Justice successfully prosecuted Duke Energy under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for the killing of 14 golden eagles at a wind farm in Wyoming; the following month the Obama Administration finalized a rule legalizing the incidental killing of golden and bald eagles by wind farms over a 30-year period of operation, a decision which flies in the face of federal law and drastically heightens the likelihood of further eagle mortality.
I first spoke with Todd Katzner, now a biologist with the US Geologic Survey in Idaho, a few years ago when he was with the University of West Virginia conducting field research into the migratory patterns of our little known Appalachian clan of golden eagles, and in a recent study he has found that the groups within this subpopulation play a kind of leapfrog, with the eagles that breed in the far north commonly wintering farthest to the south, some migrating all the way to northern Alabama and Georgia. In doing so they pass over the middle groups, which journey only as far down as the central Appalachians, and leave those hardy groups stopping even further north far behind. Katzner believes this odd behavior offers all three groups different perks, with those willing to endure the winters further north or in higher elevations enjoying a shorter migration back to their Canadian breeding grounds in the spring, as well as first dibs on prime breeding territories. “Golden eagles are said to be an open-country bird” in the West, says Katzner. “But in the East they spend the winter primarily in dense deciduous forests, usually at higher elevations, like ridgetops and mountaintops. That’s tough country. Humans don’t go there very frequently, and when we get there, we can’t see very far in that habitat.”
At last—the excuse we’d been searching for all morning. Our luckless search for golden eagles under a frozen sky hadn’t been for nothing; just knowing they were here, unseen and largely unknown, going about their bloody business to survive in this alpine icebox with skills learned far to the our north. While the sky remained pellucid and empty, somewhere amid the ragged ridgelines and silent woodlands hunkered our glorious quarry, hunkered in turn over her quarry, an incautious rabbit or lethargic groundhog perhaps, or maybe a deer carcass unclaimed by a poor shot.
Let’s hope he used copper bullets.
