A week with the eagle hunters of Bayan-Ölgii

Bayan-Ölgii is Mongolia's westernmost province and its only majority-Kazakh one. The language in the ger is Kazakh, the tea is salted and milky, and about 250 families still hunt with golden eagles — a tradition that is roughly six centuries old here and was not interrupted by the twentieth century.

Why it is always a female

A female golden eagle is around a third heavier than a male and can take a fox. She is lifted from a cliff nest at about four months old, when she is fully feathered but has not yet learned to hunt for herself. From that day the hunter — the berkutchi — feeds her by hand.

The training

The first winter is spent teaching her to associate the hunter's arm with food and the hunter's call with the arm. She is flown on a long line to a dragged fox skin, then to live quarry, then from horseback. A bird that will come back to a moving horse in a snowstorm is a bird that took years.

She hunts from her seventh winter to her fifteenth or so, and then, at the end of a season, the hunter takes her back to the mountains, ties a sheep out as a last meal, and rides away without her. She has perhaps ten breeding years left in the wild. Keeping her would be easier; not keeping her is the point.

Going as a visitor

The hunting season runs from October to February — the eagles are not flown in summer, and a camp that offers you an eagle photograph in July is offering you a bird on a stand. The Golden Eagle Festival in early October is a real competition and worth seeing, though the quiet week afterwards in a family's winter camp is where you understand any of it.

Ask before photographing, always. And expect to be fed continuously.