By Joe Atkinson
The last time we visited I had taken a short trip out to Wyoming with my female golden eagle, Widow, to attempt to hunt her on sage grouse. We had limited success although I was highly encouraged by the experience and vowed to come back and try again. And so the story continues…..
Widow is flown in the waiting-on style, just like a falcon, all be it, a very large falcon. She is hunted at various things such as jackrabbits and pheasants. The problem I have encountered with hunting an eagle waiting-on is that jack rabbits will not run under an eagle that is overhead. In the sagebrush they simply disappear out of sight. The remedy is to have dogs to keep the jacks moving, giving the eagle an opportunity to locate the moving jack and stoop. My two ground helpers have succumbed, like all living things, to the golden years and don’t want to chase jacks up and down mountains any more. With age comes wisdom. So I am currently in a holding pattern as Zeva, our new Tazy puppy, grows big enough so as not to look like food to Widow. What is a Tazy, you ask? Well, they are the Kazakhstan version of a Saluki, bred to hunt with eagles for hundreds of years. I know! They are sight hounds that chase hares out in the desert and are heat tolerant, just what I need. The results of this new adventure will be the subject of further articles down the road, I assure you.
Early this year, and completely out of the blue, I got a phone call from Cornell University Lab of Ornithology wanting to know if they could film our eagles flying around doing natural things like hunting jack rabbits and sage grouse which eagles, of course, feed on. The University was putting together a film on the ecosystem of the sagebrush out in Wyoming and how
the golden eagle and the sage grouse live and interact with each other. This is a huge endeavor requiring years of work from many talented people but then, it’s Cornell, and I would expect nothing less. In short, they wanted to film our eagles flying and landing on rocks, sage bushes, fence posts, hunting jacks and sage grouse… Wait what? Hunting sage grouse, was that what I heard? Okay, we’ll be there!
Now comes the fun part — preparing Widow for hunting what many falconers consider the most difficult quarry to hunt with a falcon or, in my case, an eagle. With all due respect to the prairie chicken and sharp tail grouse, this article is about sage grouse so they, naturally, are the most difficult and most highly prized quarry in the world (according to this author).
Eagles are the undisputed masters of the sky; they can soar for hours and go to incredible heights. Let me give you some examples of numbers that I recorded while preparing Widow for this project. Some years ago we attached a GoPro camera to Widow and launched her off to see what would happen. The footage we got back was breathtaking — Widow climbing thousands of feet into the blue sky with the ground appearing like we were looking out the window of a jetliner. The obvious question was how high was she? I saw somewhere that a falconer attached a small altimeter that is made for small amateur rockets onto his falcon. It records the maximum height of whatever it is attached to. So I bought one and clipped it on Widow’s cuff and away she went. I, like all falconers, think my birds go really high but, in truth, I have no idea how far up they are. Let’s just say that what I thought was high wasn’t and what I thought Widow could do I had no clue. The first reading I got was 6,444 feet. Wow, that’s up there and, looking at her in the blue sky, it seemed impressively high. I
reset the altimeter and launched Widow off for another roundabout with the heavens.
The day was spectacular: clear blue sky, a slight breeze and rising temperature. Widow immediately jumped on a thermal and was taken up into the heavens as if pulled by some magical cord. She was quickly gone from sight and moments later gone from sight with my binoculars as well. Having repeated this flight style many times I was not worried although, knowing what I know now, I might have been just a little bit more concerned. Afterabout30minutesWidowcameintoviewand again stooped to the lure. As I picked her up I glanced at the altimeter, which read a disappointing 12.334 ft. I thought, damn, 12 feet, how disappointing. Clearly it had malfunctioned and only recorded the first 12 ft. of the flight. Disappointed and annoyed and muttering some bad words I reset the altimeter and launched Widow back in the air. Widow did not disappoint me. She went, nearly as I could tell, just as high and stayed out just as long as before. Upon Widow’s return my annoying, malfunctioning little altimeter was gone. Apparently it had been jettisoned during the flight to free-fall thousands of feet down, smashing into the sagebrush, never to be seen again.
A replacement was promptly ordered, the Altimeter 2, an upgrade from my original Altimeter 1. The new and more advanced version gives all kinds of cool data that the first altimeter did not. Now…… let me say this in my own defense…… it is an inherent trait of men to not read instructions. Although some men have overcome this problem, sadly, I have not. With the Altimeter 1, I charged the little bugger up, pushed the on button, zeros flashed up and off I went, who needs to waste time reading instructions! Well, seeing that the new Altimeter 2 had more functions and was
not as simple as just turning it on, I ventured into a realm I rarely go, I opened the instruction manual. The first thing I read was jaw dropping and should be a great learning lesson for me to read the instruction manual before operating any new gadget. It won’t, of course, but I feel the need to say stuff like that. Right there it said that both the Altimeter 1 and Altimeter 2 would display all elevations over 9,999 ft. as decimals, such as 12.30. Holly crap, I started calling for my wife, Cordi. That meant that Widow had gone over 12,000 feet AND had come back!
One of the other features that my new altimeter had (according to the instruction manual, which I was now reading, of course) is rate of descent, which, in falconry lingo, is how fast she was going in the stoop. The highest speed I got was 157mph which is plenty fast but, keep in mind, Widow was coming down to a stationary object, namely the lure lying on the ground.
Another reading of interest was G-forces. The Altimeter 2 will max out its ability to record G forces at 40 and that was the reading I got on numerous occasions. That is more than double what a human can take. Amazing!
My game plan was to get Widow as dialed in as possible to catching game flushed either at my feet or close by. My previous experience hunting sage grouse in Wyoming taught me many things but one in particular stands out — when there is an eagle in the air or merely nearby sage grouse will not flush unless you literally step on them. So, with this in mind, I would condition Widow with good flying, bagged pheasants, and lots of them, released at my feet.
A typical day of training would go something like this… drive out into the BLM to various places I had picked out that look like Wyoming with large amounts of sagebrush on relatively
flat ground. Widow is already trained to wait-on, but the issue now was to have her wait-on at a workable and, more importantly, filmable height. Having Widow circling around in the stratosphere at 12,000 ft. is very impressive but useless for filming. Plus, when the grouse are flushed, the flight could end up miles away, again, not good to film and, seriously, I don’t know if Widow could see the sage grouse flushing from that height anyway. I needed to get Widow to lower her pitch, which seems ironic since falconers are always searching for ways to get their falcons to go higher, not lower.
Flying eagles that wait-on is not like flying a falcon. Or maybe I should say, flying Widow is not like flying a falcon. Typically, the falconer unhoods his falcon, it rouses, looks around, out comes a mute and off they go, climbing into the sky. Well, with Widow things go slightly different. Off comes the hood, she’ll rouse, look around, hop to the ground, walk over to a sage bush, jump up and mute. Then she’ll look around some more, talk to me and then launch. She’ll fly out looking for a thermal and, if she doesn’t find one to her liking, land and wait. Sometimes two minutes, sometimes thirty minutes, it all depends on what’s out there. The second she sees a thermal, off she goes, riding the rising air out of sight. Then, at some point, she’ll jump off and come back over me at a tremendous height. Widow has, in her head, the ideal height she wants to get to before she’ll come back over. I can swing the lure until my arm falls off or lay out an entire side of beef, makes no difference, the action will not start until she is ready.
When I see her break off of the thermal I start to walk out into the sage and swing the lure. She will begin a rather rapid descent and, keeping the lure out with her locked on it, she comes in fast. When she is at, what I consider, a good height for filming, I hide the lure, causing Widow to stop her stoop and
circle. Then, out comes the pheasant! It’s hard to describe the power and speed of an eagle in a full stoop. More than anything it is the sound they make, like a jet plane going past. Before you hear the roar of the jet’s engines you hear the sizzle that is the sound of speed.
I started out with pheasants that were not such great flyers, as my thought was to allow her to gain confidence before moving on to top flying birds. Well, Widow is an accomplished eagle; she has taken lots of wild game. Why I thought she needed to build confidence beats me. I guess it goes along with not reading the instruction manual. The slower, not so flighty pheasants had zero chance, none at all. She would scoop them up in the air in such a nonchalant manner that it left me wondering how anything could ever escape an eagle. And, if the pheasant did manage to get to the ground that proved to be an even more serious mistake, as eagles are very at home on the ground. Needless to say, very few pheasants escaped. I moved on to the top-flight pheasants; prime, highly conditioned birds raised in huge flight pens that flew like rockets! This, I thought, would be the true test and would push Widow to her limits. I’ll try my best to paint a picture for you…..
It’s warm, mid morning, 70’ and the heat is building. I can feel the heat rising. There is just the slightest feeling of a breeze. Every so often it comes dancing around the sage, calling to Widow who is sitting on a sage bush just off to the right of my truck. She makes a few feather adjustments and gives a hearty rouse causing feather dust and a few down feathers to take flight in the warm rising air. I watch the down climb into the blue sky and, like Widow, I know the conditions are now right. Without any noticeable reason on my part, Widow suddenly launches from her perch and flies straight into the path of an invisible thermal, her staircase up into the heavens. I stand and
watch as she rides this magical wind, taking her higher and higher. Although I am locked on the ground, in my mind, I go with her. I am drifting with her, along for the ride, circling ever higher until the sage is now just dark shadows on the surface far below. Widow is now a pin dot in the blue sky, thousands of feet up in the air, seeing what man is not supposed to see, being what man cannot be. I stand and wait for Widow to decide when she is ready. Despite her six-and-a-half foot wingspan I can barely see her. She is in supreme condition, able to stay in the air for hours. Not quite like a wild eagle but close, as close as any eagle I have flown has been. Why she comes back to me is still a mystery, something I’ve asked myself many times.
Widow has now jumped off the thermal and is coming over me so I begin to swing the lure. Her wings are in a full tuck and she is building a tremendous amount of speed. Timing is everything. If I wait a fraction of a second too long she will get the lure before I can hide it in my vest. I quickly pick up the lure and Widow breaks off her stoop and fans out her wings. She knows what’s coming next. Out from my vest comes a rocket cock pheasant that explodes into the air, leaving me in an instant. The sound of the game bird’s wings is impressive as it accelerates out over the valley. Then I hear it, the sound of something big moving fast through the air, the sound of speed, the sound of a stooping eagle. I watch the pheasant in a full burn, heading out away from me and I see Widow streaking towards the speeding game bird, her massive legs stretched down, ready for impact. It becomes clear that the pheasant has reached its maximum acceleration and it also becomes clear that Widow has not yet reached hers. She closes in and, with little adjustments, almost in a casual manner, scoops the pheasant out of the air and keeps flying just as a prairie falcon would with a meadowlark. Widow flies out over the sage and
picks a good spot to land. I am on my way to offer a reward and repeat the process. I continued to prepare Widow for the shoot in this way and I was very pleased and confident that she would do her part. Having hawked sage grouse for years, I realize that domestic pheasants do not fly like sage grouse, not even close, but they are the closest thing available. Next stop, Wyoming!
Cordi and I arrived at camp having been led there by Marc, the producer and head dude of the project. The camp is somewhere in the vast ocean of sagebrush land that is Wyoming. If I tell you the secret spot’s location, I would have to come find you and it’s best not to go there. The plan was that house trailers would be provided for us and, get this, a camp cook! Works for me! I won’t bore you with all the daily filming like flying my eagles in the snow, 40mph winds, rain, because stuff like that is all in the course of doing a film. I will, however, give you a blow-by-blow description of the grouse flight. After all, that is the reason I wrote this article.
The whole dynamic of hunting sage grouse with an eagle is very different from hunting sage grouse with a falcon. With falcons time of day is a major issue primarily because of the threat of your falcon falling prey to a golden eagle. Golden eagles are less active in the early morning hours (9:00 to 10:00am seems to be the magical time for eagles to get moving) so it is imperative to fly your falcon earlier in the morning. When flying a falcon, you also want to find and hunt areas that are not up next to places where eagles can sit and watch your falcon catch a grouse and then go eat your falcon. For obvious reasons, these are not issues when hunting with an eagle, the advantage of being at the top of the food chain. So we thought we would have it easy – sleep in and eat breakfast while waiting for that magical hour. Ahhhh no, actually we
couldn’t. It seems the film crew also wanted sunrise shots with the morning sun glistening off the eagle’s back! All part of the job.
Unfortunately, with all the gear and two eagles in the back of our truck, bringing one of my pointers was not possible. So arrangements had been made with a local falconer to use his dog to help find grouse. John Dahlke lives in the area and is considered a leading expert on sage grouse. In addition, John has a fine setter, Bessie, that is an experienced grouse dog. Our plan was to run Bessie in suitable locations and hopefully get a point.
We ran Bessie along a sizable mountain range that had large areas of flat ground covered in sage. It didn’t take long before she got birdie and locked on a strong grouse point. I was just slightly excited, Cordi having to remind me to breathe as I was on my way to hyperventilating. We all backed off the point and I got out of the truck to prepare Widow for launch. The crew and I had formulated a plan as to the best places the cameras should be placed in order to film the action. Of course, we could only hope and guess which way the flush would go. I called John on the two-way radio and once again reassured him that I was pretty sure Widow wouldn’t go after his dog. “She has stooped coyotes but, not to worry, John, they are a different color than your dog.” I don’t think he was reassured by my saying I was pretty sure. Cordi and I had walked up on a rise to the rear of all the trucks and, more importantly, the grouse. I unhooded Widow and steeled myself for what was about to happen. Widow was unfazed by all the activity. She simply looked around, roused and flew twenty yards to another part of the same small hill that Cordi and I were standing on, landed and continued to look around. “This is totally normal”, I said into the radio, “everyone just sit tight”. After what seemed like
an hour (it really wasn’t, it just seemed that way to my oxygen deprived brain), Widow, without warning, launched into the air and flew directly towards the area where John’s dog was on point. I actually didn’t think Widow would look twice at Bessie or I would not have okayed her being out there but, hey, Widow is a female golden eagle and, well, they do look at things a little differently. But Widow flew out in a wide circle and found what she was looking for; she began to rise directly over us, gaining height with very turn. Cameras were rolling and, if nothing else, they would get great footage of an eagle mounting up…but that’s not why I came here, is it!
As Widow climbed higher and higher my gut instinct started screaming at me to go in and flush the grouse. But this would have been a futile effort because Widow, as you know, wants to get to her and, only her, special height before she’ll do anything. So we waited and watched. Widow was joined by a first year female golden who called to her hoping to get some food. The two eagles climbed out of sight to the unaided eye. One camera with a monster lens followed Widow for quite some time but soon lost sight of her as well as with binoculars. Widow was now somewhere overhead in the upper stratosphere, my telemetry receiver told me. Everyone was getting a little nervous as our star had just disappeared and had now been gone for twenty minutes and counting. I, on the other hand, remained calm. This was not unusual for Widow, in fact, mere routine. I did start to think, however, that we are in Wyoming and things are bigger and, to me anyway, more inviting to an eagle thousands of feet up in the air to drift off. Breathe, Joe, breathe, I said to myself.
After what seemed like an eternity with me swinging the lure and dragging the lure up and down the road, someone yelled that they saw her! Cordi confirmed that indeed the signal was
coming from that speck in the sky. I began to move out into the area where Bessie told us the grouse were. During the long agonizing wait John had moved out to stand by his setter, which was a good idea, all things considered. I kept my eye on Widow who was dead over my head, straight up, all be it somewhere in the 4000-5000 ft. range, just a little too high. I started to swing the lure and Widow began her descent. Just as she approached what I thought was a workable height a raven showed up out of nowhere and started to stoop at Widow’s head! I couldn’t believe it! This raven (insert many four letter words of your choice) was relentless, making short quick stoops seemingly trying to hit Widow in the head. As you can imagine, Widow found this very distracting. Meanwhile, I had waited as long as I could and went in to flush the grouse. After all this time, with trucks, radios squawking, cameras, a dog, people milling about for nearly an hour, I was questioning whether they had ever been there in the first place. Anyone that has flown sage grouse would bet they were never there, as grouse would not hold with all that going on around them. But remember, I said sage grouse will not flush with an eagle in the area, so I pressed on, guided by John, to the exact spot his dog was on point. And suddenly, without warning, four or five grouse exploded from the sage right under my eagle! The raven continued to press its attack and Widow, now having seen something flush under my feet, is banking into a stoop with the raven in hot pursuit. (Please insert another bunch of four letter words!) The grouse flew low and fast away from me and Widow was tracking them from above. She began to stoop but, now understandably very annoyed by the raven, pulled out and came back over me looking for another chance. Sadly, however, all the grouse were gone and, now finally, the (bad word) raven had flown off!
Widow, probably in frustration, went back into the stratosphere and, three hours later and many miles of walking the hills of Wyoming, Cordi and I found her with a half crop full of some unknown food. I hoped it was the raven. This, of course, was going to greatly affect the next day’s flights, which it did. The next day, the sizeable crop along with a 40mph wind resulted in Widow soaring over the other side of a rather sizable mountain range. After another four hour hunt we found her and called her down.
The filming schedule did not allow time for any more grouse hawking. So I’ll have to be content with coming oh-so-close for now! But I’ll be back!