The wondrous life and mysterious death of Golden Eagle 1703
One morning toward the end of January 2019, Steve Lewis, a US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) biologist in Juneau, Alaska, logged on to the website Movebank.org to check the whereabouts of some golden eagles that he had tagged with GPS trackers.
Lewis, a lanky, outdoorsy 49-year-old, usually tried to look at the location data once a week, but he had spent most of the month at home on furlough, unable to work as a result of the government shutdown. Eager to catch up with his birds, Lewis beelined it to his office when he got back to work. “The first thing I did,” he says, “was go and check on my eagle tags.”
One bird in particular, Golden Eagle 1703, gave him pause. Lewis knew the animal well. He had tagged it on 26 July 2017, when it was still a nestling on a rocky outcrop in Denali national park and preserve. Even before it knew how to fly, 1703 displayed its might by leaping from its nest and gliding a quarter mile down a valley to evade Lewis’s initial attempt at tagging it. After a short hike, Lewis and his team retrieved the squawking bundle of black and white feathers, outfitted it with the tracking device, and returned it safely to its nest.
In the 18 months that followed, 1703 flourished. The bird traversed about 8,000 miles, from Denali to Wyoming, all the way back up to Alaska’s North Slope, where it probably feasted on waterfowl and perhaps a straggling caribou calve of two. From there, it carved a long, treacherous path south through the wilderness of western Canada and worked its way back to the lower 48 to hunker down for its second winter on Earth.
