This time of year eagles gather out on the plains near town. The sheep have arrived and they’ll spend the winter picking through spent sugar beet fields. The eagles keep watch from nearby cottonwoods.
The birds are mostly bald eagles, though there are a few goldens thrown into the mix. It’s assumed the balds are there fulfilling their favored role as scavengers, waiting for otherwise sick livestock to succumb to winter. As for the goldens, I’m not so sure they are content to wait for the sheep to die on their own. There are numerous accounts of golden eagles attacking good-sized prey, from young wild sheep to full-grown deer and even adult caribou.
A bird with that kind of talent for killing shouldn’t have much of a problem with a domestic sheep standing out in the middle of a harvested beet field. Heck, even the guard llamas I usually see mingling with the herds might be a target.
I’ve always figured bald and golden eagles were closely related. The birds are of similar size and other than the white heads and tails of the balds, the species seemed like twins to my untrained eye. While it seems scientists are still sorting out the details of the complicated family tree of raptors such as eagles, hawks and buzzards, this much is clear: balds are classified as a type of sea eagle, while goldens are grouped with other “true” eagles.
In the Northern Rockies these are the largest predatory birds in town. The bald generally gets the nod as the larger of the two, though the size difference is minimal and the females of either species are always bigger than males.
Balds are common in the water-rich Flathead. A mating pair that has built a large nest in a Ponderosa overlooking Rogers Lake is a constant fixture when we fish the grayling run. There is usually a bald perched above the water where the spawning stream dumps into the lake. I’ve watched as grayling injured in the throes of spawning drift back into the lake belly up. They don’t last long in that condition. The eagles also seem to do just fine picking off healthy grayling whenever the fish range too close to the surface.
Some of my best bald eagle sightings are on the crowded stretch of the Middle Fork just downstream from West Glacier. We often see eagles on float trips as the river reaches the canyon, and more than once we’ve had them fly upriver low enough it seemed we could have touched them with the tips of our fly rods.
I moved to the Flathead long after the Kokanee fishery on the big lake collapsed so I never saw the concentration of bald eagles that once gathered at McDonald Creek during the salmon spawning run. An old story from “The New York Times” from 1982 laments the declining number of bald eagles. Back when that meant something the bald eagle gathering was considered the largest in the lower 48.
Bald eagles were protected in 1967 and were one of the first animals to be listed as an endangered species under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. But our national bird is one of the great success stories of this legislation, and with the banning of DDT and other protective measures, the population roared back. Bald eagles were delisted in 2007.
Goldens do their hunting on land so they weren’t threatened by DDT bioaccumulation — which caused thin egg shells and nesting failure for fish eating birds. More predatory in nature than bald eagles, goldens spend most of their time hunting small mammals. There are plenty of cottontail and jackrabbits in the hills where I hunt birds, and golden eagles are a common sight year round. The rocky point near where I buried my old bird dog Jack is a favored perch of the big predators. I occasionally flush a golden from a nearby sandstone ledge when I stop to check the grave.
Final note: while goldens are certainly capable of hunting good sized prey, the popular YouTube video of a large eagle swooping down to lift a toddler from a suburban park is fortunately a fake.