Hunting with eagles

Hunting with eagles is a traditional form of falconry found throughout the Eurasian Steppe, practiced by ancient Khitan and Turkic peoples. Today it is practiced by Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz in contemporary Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as diasporas in Bayan-Ölgii Provinces Bayan-Ölgii, Mongolia, and Xinjiang, China. Though these people are most famous for hunting with golden eagles, they have been known to train northern goshawks, peregrine falcons, saker falcons, and more.[1]

Song dynasty painting of Khitan eagle hunters on horse 10th century

From The Bigger Picture section in Chapter 1 of Dr. Lauren McGough's PhD thesis study entitled "Partnerships and understanding between Kazakh pastoralists and golden eagles of the Altai mountains : a multi-species ethnography" published on April 12, 2019 (University of St. Andrews): "I’d like to [...] give the reader a broader overview of the pastoralism and eagle culture of Bayan-Olgii. This westernmost province or aimag of Mongolia, which is 80% ethnically Kazakh, comprises several counties or soums. The provincial capital is Olgii, a city of some 30,000 people. The Kazakhs of Bayan-Olgii are somewhat isolated – torn between their nation-state of Kazakhstan, within which they would not be able to live a traditional nomadic, pastoralist lifestyle, and the country of Mongolia, a state that is populated by ethnic Mongols, who are primarily Buddhist and have an entirely different linguistic, historical and cultural tradition. Kukan and my informants proudly referred to themselves as “Mongolian Kazakhs” and felt that they would neither fit in, nor desire to live in, Kazakhstan or in the other aimags of Mongolia. Within Bayan-Olgii, there are some 300 Kazakhs who keep eagles. The majority of them live in Olgii city or in Sagsai, a village some 30 kilometers from Olgii. In the more remote soums, such as Daluun, Bayan-Nuur and Bulgan (200-500 kilometers distant) there are perhaps a dozen berkutchi in each. Hunting with eagles changes quite profoundly the further you travel from Olgii city. The key to understanding this is tourism.In the 1990s, Mongolia devoted a lot of funding and resources to encouraging tourism and creating a navigable tourist infrastructure. It has been very successful, and outside mining, tourism now represents the primary source of GDP for the country. In 1999, the Golden Eagle Festival was founded in Olgii City in order to encourage tourism to Bayan-Olgii. The Festival takes place In October, and consists of three events over two days in which a panel of judges scores a berkutchi and his eagle. The first event is a judging of the berkutchi’s appearance.Is he (as well as the horse and eagle) wearing traditional clothing, and howexceptional does it look? The second event is a judging of an eagle’s willingness to fly to the berkutchi’s glove. How fast does the eagle respond? The third and final event is a judging of an eagle’s willingness to attack a dragged fox pelt. Does she attack it aggressively as if it were a real fox? Since actual hunting takes place in deep winter and is very physically demanding, many tourists are not able to experience it. The Festival is a substitute. However, the eagles that will excel at the Festival are very different from eagles that will excel at catching foxes in remote areas.In the next chapter, I will write about how sub-adult eagles are trapped and socialized with humans. These eagles, fiercely independent creatures, are ideal hunting partners. However, they aren’t so tolerant of new situations or crowds of people. At the Festival, which has become very popular in recent years (hosting several hundred tourists), wild-trapped sub-adult eagles will not tolerate flying near huge crowds. They’ll fly away instead, back to the safety of the remote, sparsely inhabited stretches of the Altai. In order to have eagles to fly at the Festival, some Kazakhs have taken to using colberkuts or ‘hand-eagles’. These are eagles where are taken from the nest as downy chicks, or eyasses to use the falconry term, at mere days of age. These eagles become imprinted on humans, and know nothing other than life with humans. Thus, they are impossible to lose and have no fear of the largest thronging crowd. They will fly to the glove and the fox pelt at the Festival without issue.However, these eagles, deprived of the learning experience with their parents, don’t know how to hunt. As any fox-catching eaglehunter will tell you, humans can only do a poor job of teaching an eagle how to hunt. The utility of trapping a sub-adult eagle, is it already knows how to catch foxes, you merely have to convince the eagle that you are an ally in that pursuit. What I then found, is that the closer I was to Olgii city, the more colberkuts I saw. These hand-raised eagles gives themselves away by continually begging for food (these eagles are too mentally stunted to reach adolescence, and can never be released). The food call is a loud “psh-ack psh-ack psh-ack” sound. They also fly weakly and have no level of fitness. As useless as colberkuts are for hunting, they are great for tourism. Tourists don’t know the difference. A large portion of the 300 berkutchi mentioned are Kazakhs who keep these colberkuts purely to take to the Festival and to show to tourists.One can hardly blame them, as to be able to invite tourists into your home can represent a lot of income for a family that typically relies on volatile cashmere and meat prices.However, this recent phenomenon of the Festival and colberkuts is not within the scope of this thesis. This thesis is focused on eagle culture and the tradition of hunting with eagles as it relates to the practical catching of foxes. That is, the millennia sustained tradition of trapping sub-adult eagles, socializing them to hunt in partnership with humans, and then releasing them. This is the tradition from which the vast well of ethno-ornithological knowledge of the Kazakh people comes.Outside the magnet of Olgii City, Kazakhs are watching for clues about the movement of eagles. The window for trapping, when migrating eagles bottleneck in Bayan-Olgii, is a few short weeks in October. This rush can initiate a flurry of activity. Herders are in constant contact to try to spot the first individuals coming down and ascertain when the migration reaches its zenith and when the most advantageous time to lay traps is. It’s a period of extreme uncertainty. There is necessarily an element of luck involved in trapping an eagle, especially one that will be a great hunting partner. Many superstitions about the natural world come into play when one is searching for an eagle. Trapping an eagle is almost seen as a gift from the divine, and if you’ve harbored bad thoughts or acted unscrupulously against nature, you will look in vain until the window is closed. But if you’ve done well by your family, livestock and nature, you might trap an eagle so fine she’ll be with you for ten years. Kukan, my mentor, used the eagles in his life to mark the passage of time. At 59 years old, he counted backwards the 8 eagles he had flown in his lifetime. The great hunters, the kirans he flew for a decade. The mediocre eagles he stayed with for a year or two. Eagles colored everything he mentioned from his past. A son was born when he had a kiran, and his wife had died when he had an eagle that seemingly couldn’t catch anything. He spoke of the time of his wife’s death with anguish – he didn’t even have an eagle then that could help him escape the pain he had felt. One of the happiest times in Kukan’s life is when he used to hunt with his father in his twenties. They both had eagles that were wonderful hunters, true kirans, and many days they would come home with a fox affixed to each horses’ saddle – no easy feat. When I asked Kukan of all the eagles he had flown, whichwas his favorite, he didn’t hesitate to answer that his favorite was the eagle he flew with his father. I suspected that though the eagle was great hunter, the fact that she brought him close to his father was the true reason she was regarded so highly. Eagles can be intergenerational glue. As individual eagles helped Kukan mark different periods of his life, so did the greater community of eagles. He spoke of years where there were eagles everywhere and years where there were no wild eagles to be seen. Eagles were an indicator of the health of the natural world, and whether the Kazakhs were being responsible to Allah or not. On low eagle years, Kukan and his brethren were reluctant to hunt wild game, as they feared that had taken too much previously. On abundant eagle years, Kukan was always organizing hunts for wolves and deer as it was the time to harvest. From a biological perspective, when a top tier predator species is abundant, the animals that comprise the rest of the pyramid must also be robust and numerous in order to sustain that level of predation." [21]