Well, now, there is also the The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors. This is the same thing but for Raptors. The book is coming out RIGHT NOW so Princeton has organized a major blogging tour, and right now, you’re on the tour! The other blog posts are as indicated here, on this schedule. I recommend visiting all the other entries. Some of them are giving away prizes, so especially check those out.

As a matter of fact, we’re giving away a prize here, right now, on this blog post, and you may be able to win it. Details are below. But first, a word about ….

… Golden Eagles …

Golden Eagles are a bit of a sore spot with me because they are rare and said to be hard to distinguish from immature Bald Eagles. This is not their fault. But when one claims to have seen a Golden Eagle the automatic reaction among most birders is to claim that you are wrong, that it was an immature Bald Eagle you had seen. This is especially true in Minnesota. If you look at bird books, they are sometimes not shown to be here at all, even as migrants, or otherwise, only rarely.

Stan Tekiela’s Birds of Minnesota Field Guide, Second Edition does not even list Golden Eagles. The Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America shows northern and central Minnesota as a migratory route, but the rest of the state is indicated as “rare.” Birds of Minnesota and Wisconsin indicates them to be an uncommon migrant or winter visitor in parts of the region. The Birds of North America and Greenland: (Princeton Illustrated Checklists) shows them as occassional winter visitor in only a small area to the West of Minnesota. National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, Sixth Edition shows them only rarely in Minnesota, but more in the eastern part of the state. Hawks and Owls of the Great Lakes Region and Eastern North America shows them as an occasional winter species in Minnesota and a very large area of the plains and the eastern US.

The Kaufman Field Guide to Birds Of North America shows them totally absent in the state, but this book also has another interesting geographical observation. There is a huge area of eastern Canada with a dotted line around it indicating that they may or may not breed there. This is an interesting thing about Golden Eagles. When you look into it, you find that there is this large not very mountainous region in which this mountain bird seems to breed, migrate to and from, but is not observed within. Like they were hiding out there. The Birds Of The Great Plains shows them rare in Minnesota and more common to the west than the east.

Of course, one always wants to consult the bible in these matters. The Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America (Peterson Field Guides) shows them totally absent in Minnesota, but also indicates the big mysterious region to the north where they may or may not breed.

Now that we’ve established that there is no agreement whatsoever on the distribution of, timing of, or even existence of, the Golden Eagle in Minnesota, let me tell you about two of our sightings of the bird (there’s been a few but these two are particularly interesting).

The firs sighting was about 10 years ago. Julia was about seven, and we were visiting the Minnesota Raptor Center in Falcon Heights. We were being given a tour of the cages, where various raptors were kept. These birds were all rescued from somewhere, generally with injuries. Some would be rehabilitated and released. Some would become ambassador birds, traveling around the area with experts from the Raptor Center for educational purposes. Some would simply remain in the cages forever.

As the tour progressed, the tour guide would say a few things about each bird as we approached the cage, then we would look at the bird for a while, then move on to the next cage. At once point, she said, “And here is the Golden Eagle. There are no Golden Eagles in Minnesota, not at all. If you ever think you are seeing a Golden Eagle, I assure you that it is merely an immature Bald Eagle. There are no Golden Eagles in this state.”

Then, as we stopped in front of the cage to look at the bird, Julia pointed to it and said, “There’s one!”

“What?” the guid said.

“There’s a Golden Eagle. It’s in Minnesota. So you’re wrong.”

I was fully expecting to find, on further inquiry, that this particular bird had been found injured along the highway in some other state and brought here to the Minnesota Raptor Center for treatment. So, I asked, “Where is this bird from?”

We were given a very precise location, along a road near a particular town. In Minnesota. In fact, within a one hour drive from where the bird was sitting in the cage. So, there you go.

The second sighting was up at the cabin. It was early fall and we were sitting on the deck overlooking the lake, to the north. Although we were located a short distance outside the Chippewa National Forest, which is known to have the highest number and highest density of Bald Eagles in the US outside of Alaska, the tree line across the lake was in the forest proper, and in fact, this was an excellent place to see bald eagles. A nesting pair lived in sight just a few hundred yards to the left, and hunted in this bay. Sometimes other eagles came by, and the pair often had a young one. If you want to see a bald eagle from that spot, all you had to do is look. If the eagle was not visible that instance, all you had to do was listen and you’d hear either the eagles themselves or some other bird complaining about the eagles. Indeed, that is the main reason for the local loons to holler. If you hear the loon going loony just look up. There will be one or two bald eagles reeling at altitude over the loon, sharing the fishing grounds.

Anyway, we were sitting there looking north when suddenly there appeared over the tree line to the north, across the lake, a bird that was clearly a very large eagle, and it was flapping its wings in powered flight going in a straight line right for us. We knew it was an eagle because of its shape and size. However, it was significantly larger looking than any of the bald eagles in the area. I should note that despite the large number and high density of eagles in Chippewa Forest, these Bald Eagles are smaller than the Alaskan kind. But this bird was whopping big.

Also, it was flying funny. Not only was it not soaring as eagles tend to do, it was flapping its wings in what looked like an unusual pattern. And, it was not a bald eagle. As it got closer, we watched it with binoculars and could see the field markings very clearly.

“That was a Golden Eagle, wasn’t it?” I said to Amanda.

“I guess so,” she replied.

“You could see a bit of white on the upper wings before it came over us.”

“Yeah, I saw that. You could see white on its tail shinning through with the sun.”

“It had a small head.”

“And a smaller bill.”

“I know, and that color was different than an immature Bald Eagle.”

“When it stopped flapping for a while its wings almost looked like a vulture.”

“I know. All the field markings seem to suggest a Golden Eagle, not an immature Bald Eagle.”

“Yeah, and you know what,” Amanda said.

“What?”

“We know what an immature Bald Eagle looks like. That wasn’t one of them.”

And now it’s your turn. The following illustration shows several raptors. Each is labeled with a letter. Some of these raptors are Golden Eagles, some are not.

Your job is to identify the Golden Eagles. Put a set of letters that represent only Golden Eagles in a comment. I will collect all the perfectly correct answers and send them to Price Waterhouse in a briefcase, where one of the correct answers will be randomly selected.

If you use a proper email address when you sign in to comment, then I’ll be able to contact you if you are chosen. Otherwise I’ll just mark the correct and chosen comment here on this blog and you can check back later, and if you were the winner we’ll work out how to send you your prize, provided by Princeton University Press.

The prize will be two pounds of Birds and Beans Coffee! It will be sent to you by the good people of Princeton.

Also note that Princeton has a contest in which you can win a pair of Nikon 8220 Trailblazer 8×42 ATB Binoculars and some autographed bird books. Details are HERE.

Happy Birding!

We’ll pick the winner on April 1st.

I hope I won’t disappoint you … this is not about John Ashcroft. It is about golden eagles (actually, maybe its about one golden eagle in particular).

A timely repost.

The golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) has been in decline for a very long time, so you may not know it formerly bred in a much wider range of habitats, across the entire U.S. Today it is known as a mountain eagle because this is where it is generally found, at least in North America. Any experienced birder will tell you that in places like Minnesota nine out of ten, or maybe 99 out of 100 golden eagle sightings are immature bald eagles.

Last winter my wife, Amanda, and daughter, Julia and I attended a talk (on owls) at the Minnesota Raptor Center in Falcon Heights. While there we took a tour through the facility, where several captive birds are kept. Some of these birds are in rehab and will be released, others are permanent residents because of some major disability. As we were shown around, the gracious and knowledgeable volunteer told us “Golden Eagles are not native to Minnesota. You never see them here. We get a lot of people telling us they saw a golden eagle, but I guarantee you it is always an immature bald….” And at that moment we were directed around a corner to see, in all it’s glory, a majestic golden eagle in one of the enclosures. Now, this was just after the “all our birds are brought here by our people or game officers from locations all over Minnesota” speech, so I said … “Well, there’s one there … in that cage … a golden eagle. There must be some of them in Minnesota.” I was trying not to be snide, really. The volunteer made some sort of apologies for the eagle being there, admitted it was brought in from a site in Minnesota, but stuck to her story that there are no golden eagles in the state. Whatever.

Julia, who at the time was 10, is quite an aficionado of the raptors and is pretty good at identifying them. Earlier in the year, during the summer, she pointed out to me three bald eagles and a golden eagle flying over an island in a Cass County lake. I told her “Well, you know, most golden eagles are actually immature ba…” “No kidding, dad,” she interrupted. “But really, look at the three bald eagles and the golden flying over the trees on Horseshoe Island…”

I have to admit, I could not see any of them too well … no binoculars and they were pretty far away … but the “golden” was much bigger than the others … and kind of flew differently. But they quickly passed beyond the tree line and I got distracted with other things, so I can’t count this as a confirmed sighting.

But I was diligent in coming weeks to make sure that Julia understood that this was a common mistake, and that it did no one any good to label an immature bald as a golden. The bird was the bird that it was. Correct identification is very important, and it is better to say “I don’t know” than to be definitive about something you are not really sure of. I reminded her of the time her schoolmate came up to the lake with us, and on seeing a flock of crows, exclaimed: “Look, a flock of hawks.” We were polite and merely exchanged glances, but we felt the pain of embarrassment. No, Julia, misidentification is an honest mistake but one we must work diligently to overcome. There are no golden eagles in Minnesota … that’s what they said at the raptor center … so a sighting of one of these birds would be very meaningful. Let’s get it right. And so on and so forth.

I started going to this location … my wife’s family cabin … two summers ago, and we have spent a lot of time there. Last spring we made a vow to spend as much time at the cabin as we could over spring/summer/fall. We kept our promise to ourselves and have been there quite a bit. In fact, we were there last weekend, and saw much to our surprise two bald eagles. There is very little open water anywhere nearby, so I would have thought they’d have gone down the Mississippi or to the Great Lakes, but there they were on the second weekend in January reeling over the treetops near Longville Minnesota.

But I digress. Over these last couple of years, we have watched a nesting pair of bald eagles launch into adulthood one offspring and start to raise another. There are a few nesting pairs in the area, so we see adult and juvenile bald eagles quite often. It is impossible to distinguish among individuals, so when we see one or a pair we cannot always tell if it is “ours.” But if we ever feel inclined to see a bald eagle, all we have to do is walk to the end of the dock and turn left, and one or two are almost always there, on the nest, near the nest, or perched on a nearby tree looking over the water. If they are not there it usually suffices to scan the skies and there will be an eagle soaring or fishing. Sometimes they make themselves even more obvious, like one day in November when one of the eagles took down a flying great blue heron, grabbing it by the leg, the two reeling to just above the lake surface when the eagle let go. Joined by it’s mate, the two eagles harassed the heron for quite some time thereafter.

So, one of the the late season weekends last summer, Amanda and I were sitting on the deck in front of the cabin when we saw an eagle approaching from a great distance. The bird was flying hard against a strong southerly wind (we were looking north) so as it flapped its wings it did not make a lot of progress. This meant we could see it for a very long time, get out the binoculars, watch it approach and eventually fly right over head in slow motion. It was very large. As it approached, it became clear that this was an eagle, but lacking adult bald eagle markings. Ninety nine out of a hundred times this would be an immature bald, but it simply did not look like an immature bald. It’s wings did not flap as I expected a Bald Eagle’s to flap. On first seeing the bird I thought … “This is not an eagle, maybe a heron or something” but as it got closer, there was no doubt. Amanda and I exchanged comments and opinions. “I hate to say it, but that looks like a golden.” “You know, 99 out of 100 times it’s an immature bald.” “Yeah, but the only immature bald we are seeing these days is sitting on that tree over there alarm calling.” “Right, but you know, at the raptor center, you know, but the immature balds … they look like goldens…”

Then, as the huge golden bird struggling with measured effort against the southerly fetch soared directly overhead, the bald eagles and loons crying out in alarm, Amanda said the words that made the most sense:

“Greg, we know what an immature bald eagle looks like. We see them all the time. That is not an immature bald eagle.”

So, I’m figuring it was a chickadee….. (just to be safe).

Here is the video:

Some people who have discussed this video may have seen only a shorter version showing the last bit.

Here are some of the arguments given pro and con on this video’s realness, and my assessment of them.

1) It is real because Golden Eagles occasionally eat children.   Maybe. There is no particular reason that a Golden Eagle would not eat a child, though I know of no confirmed reports of this. This particular question … could or would a Golden Eagle do this … is part of a larger theme of belief in non-human animals eating humans. People are mostly divided on this issue. Lions, it is said, don’t eat humans because they don’t like the taste. However, they do now and then. Lions and other cats tend to specialize on their prey, so day to day, healthy pride lions eat one or two species of antelope (or something) as do leopards and other cats. Switching to humans is not uncommon for large predators, but once they do they are killed. So, you don’t have very many long-career human-eating large predators. The idea that a predator won’t eat a human because of some mystical exceptional property of humans (including taste) is wishful thinking. But, predators who do so immediately face serious odds against them because humans are a bad-ass species. There is no a priori reason to say that a Golden Eagle would not or could not attack and/or eat a human infant and/or toddler. It is, however, unlikely. But, unlikely events happen. Conclusion: This point does not tell us if the video is fake.

2) It is real because Golden Eagles can and do eat large prey. This is absolutely true. Golden Eagles are the (mostly) Temperate version of the large Monkey-Easting and other eagles found in many areas across the world, and they tend to specialize on largish prey. The better known (to the average Westerner) “Bald Eagle” and its sister species in Eurasia are in that size range, much more numerous, but specialize in fish, but even they occasionally take a fawn or other large non-fish (and often, they take birds). Conclusion: Plausible.

3) It is not true because Gold Eagles are rare in Montreal. True, they are in fact rare everywhere as most large territorial predators are (with some exceptions) and Golden Eagles are especially rare and “shy” of human settlements. They do live in the general area, though, and they seem to migrate from Canada to points south, so a Golden Eagle passing through is not at all impossible. Conclusion: Plausable.

4) It is not true because it is an Osprey not a Golden Eagle. I believe that this was said by a bird expert who may have seen only the shorter version of the clip. On watching the clip, I believe it is an Eagle because it looks like one. It could be an “immature” (year old, full grown) Bald Eagle, but the markings on the wing actually look like a Golden Eagle. However, telling an immature Bald from a Golden is tricky and actually requires more of a look than we get in this video. Conclusion: Nothing is disproven here.

5) It is not real because an Eagle of this size can’t lift something as heavy as an infant or toddler that high in the air. This is my personal favorite for why the video is faked, and as far as I know I’m the only person to have noted this (on various facebook posts) so far. People have argued against this saying “Eagles take large prey” and “There’s this video of them taking a wolf” and “There’s this video of them lifting mountain goats” but all that is wrong. There is one “real” video shown on Animal Planet shot from above of a gold eagle grasping a mountain goat kid that it has dragged off a cliff and “guiding” its body down as it falls, seemingly dragging it across a ravine to a cliff face. But at no point does the Eagle lift the kid. In other videos of a Golden Eagle attacking (under human command) wolves or in other cases hunting Geese does a Golden Eagle lift anything off the ground.

Bald Eagles, which are about the same size, or a bit smaller depending on which population we are looking at, lift fish they’ve caught out of the water and fly off with them, but it is a struggle. If a Bald Eagle grabs a fish that is too big, the bird will fly just above the water dragging the fish on the surface. In some cases, the Bald Eagle virtually swims atop the water with the entaloned fish under or just on top of the water, to the nearest shore, where it drags it (with difficulty) to the land, kills it, rests for a while, then eats it. (Then spends considerable time drying off!) The fish that are too large for the Eagle to lift out of the water are significantly lighter than a human infant. Conclusion: The part where the eagle lifts the child up into the air is fake. This still leaves the possibility that an Eagle or Eagle like raptor swooped down on a child, but there was no lifting.

6) It is not real because this is not how Golden Eagles hunt their prey, for a couple of different reasons (this is an extention of #5). The large eagles such as the Golden Eagle and the various monkey eating eagles do knock large prey (like monkeys) off of branches or cliffs, pounce on them, rip them up and eat them on the spot. But they only carry off bits and pieces if they carry anything off at all. I’ve seen this in the Congo: You find a monkey killed by an Eagle, but abandoned (because humans came along). You convince the Pygmies to leave the monkey there and come back later in the day and a limb is missing. You come back still later in the day and only half the body is there. You come back even later and it is all gone. Conclusion: Not relevant, but instructive, and there is always room for a Pygmy story.

7) It is fake because the carrying-off of prey behavior is done during nesting and this eagle was not nesting. Eagles carry food to their nests only when they are feeding young that are there. There are no nesting Golden Eagles near any parks in or near Montreal, and this is not really nesting season. When the Canadians are wearing warm clothes, the only “nested” eagles are large enough to fly to the food mom or dad have killed on the ground. The Golden Eagle would have killed the infant/toddler on the spot and eaten it there… But that would not have happened because an Eagle would not try to kill and eat a small human while the other, large humans are standing around ready to stomp the Eagle. Conclusion, the Eagle in question was an idiot.

It is possible, as I suggested above, that a large raptor did swoop down and strike a kid. That is not entirely impossible. Had that happened, a lot less of the video would have to be faked! But the bit of the video where the eagle lifts the child into the air did not happen. That is faked.

UPDATE: 8) It is fake because someone admitted to having faked it. Conclusion: Assuming they are not faking having faked it, this would indicate it was faked.

This is being discussed on my facebook page, Don Prothero’s facebook page, here, here, and here.