"The eagle has landed"
In a manner of speaking
Yellowstone National Park golden eagle research subject delivered to the roadside
As I headed east through the area known as “Yellowstone Picnic” into Little America I came across a small crowd at a pullout with spotting scopes set up and cameras with long lenses pointed towards a spot far off the road to the north. I pulled over and looked through my binoculars. What should I see but a man with a fox dancing around his feet. My first through was, “What kind of idiot is that, going way out there and feeding a fox?!?!” Someone pulled up next to me and explained that the he was out there as part of a golden eagle research team. I still wasn’t able to put it together, but then he began skiing back to the road. As he neared it became clear that he had something large under his arm.
It turns out that there was a deer carcass (a winter kill – it’s not unusual for animals to drop dead from exposure and starvation in Yellowstone’s mean winters – or a wolf, mountain lion, or even coyote kill if the deer was sufficiently weak) attracting all the usual visitors. Golden (and bald) eagles are opportunistic carrion-eaters, so the researchers knew a goldie would show up sooner or later. The fox was just trying to defend its wonderful meal from that human who might be trying to steal it! Photo taken at an extreme distance in relation to my lens’s capabilities, but you can make out the fox and the net trap as well as the researcher. I believe the dark brown blob on the ground is the eagle.
My friends had seen two men skiing into that area before sunup (and had also concluded the men must be mad to be skiing in the cold, dark, pre-dawn). Apparently it was the two researchers going out to lay a bow-type net trap and finally, by 9 A.M., acquired their target when it came to feed.
The researcher brought the hooded eagle (a technique falconers have used for millennia that functions to keep the birds calm), with its dagger talons safely immobilized in an Ace bandage, and wrapped in a towel for warmth, back to the roadside. His colleague and project leader, Dave Haines, gave the small gathering a few minutes to photograph the bird before he and his colleague took it to a ranger station for banding, tagging, weighing and measuring, and overall examination and evaluation. It would be released when data collection was complete.
"The eagle has landed"
In a manner of speaking
Yellowstone National Park golden eagle research subject delivered to the roadside
As I headed east through the area known as “Yellowstone Picnic” into Little America I came across a small crowd at a pullout with spotting scopes set up and cameras with long lenses pointed towards a spot far off the road to the north. I pulled over and looked through my binoculars. What should I see but a man with a fox dancing around his feet. My first through was, “What kind of idiot is that, going way out there and feeding a fox?!?!” Someone pulled up next to me and explained that the he was out there as part of a golden eagle research team. I still wasn’t able to put it together, but then he began skiing back to the road. As he neared it became clear that he had something large under his arm.
It turns out that there was a deer carcass (a winter kill – it’s not unusual for animals to drop dead from exposure and starvation in Yellowstone’s mean winters – or a wolf, mountain lion, or even coyote kill if the deer was sufficiently weak) attracting all the usual visitors. Golden (and bald) eagles are opportunistic carrion-eaters, so the researchers knew a goldie would show up sooner or later. The fox was just trying to defend its wonderful meal from that human who might be trying to steal it! Photo taken at an extreme distance in relation to my lens’s capabilities, but you can make out the fox and the net trap as well as the researcher. I believe the dark brown blob on the ground is the eagle.
My friends had seen two men skiing into that area before sunup (and had also concluded the men must be mad to be skiing in the cold, dark, pre-dawn). Apparently it was the two researchers going out to lay a bow-type net trap and finally, by 9 A.M., acquired their target when it came to feed.
The researcher brought the hooded eagle (a technique falconers have used for millennia that functions to keep the birds calm), with its dagger talons safely immobilized in an Ace bandage, and wrapped in a towel for warmth, back to the roadside. His colleague and project leader, Dave Haines, gave the small gathering a few minutes to photograph the bird before he and his colleague took it to a ranger station for banding, tagging, weighing and measuring, and overall examination and evaluation. It would be released when data collection was complete.