Card #034 · Birds
Golden eagle
Aquila chrysaetos
Common LC · Least Concern
Field notes
- Classification
- Order Accipitriformes · Family Accipitridae
- Range
- Mountains and open country across the Northern Hemisphere
- Size
- 66–102 cm (26–40 in)
- Weight
- 3.6–5.1 kg (8–11 lb)
- Lifespan
- ~30 yrs (wild)
- Diet
- Hares, marmots, birds
Most Notable
Its eyesight is usually quoted as eight times a human's. Measured, a large eagle resolves about twice the detail we do, which is still among the sharpest vision ever recorded.
In the Altai, Kazakh hunters still take a young female from the nest, fly her at fox from horseback through a decade of winters, and then let her go back to the mountains to breed. A few hundred people are still doing it.
Females do the hunting, in the mountains and on the glove. She is the larger sex by a wide margin, which is why eagle hunters take females and why the birds flown at fox are all hens.
A pair can hold two hundred square kilometres. Golden eagle home ranges run from about 20 up to 200 square kilometres depending on how much food the country holds, which is why they read as rare even where they are not.
The nest outlives the season. Eyries on cliff ledges get returned to and added to year after year, so an old one is a structure built by generations of birds rather than a single spring's work.
It is one of the most widely spread birds of prey on earth, which is the honest reason for a Least Concern badge on an animal this imposing. Scotland, the Alps, the Atlas, Kamchatka and the Rockies are all the same species.
Range: Mountain and open country right across the north.