Golden Eagle Festival

The Golden Eagle Festival or Eagle Festival (Бүргэдийн наадам/бүркіт той), is an annual traditional festival held in Bayan-Ölgii aimag, Mongolia.[1] In the eagle festival, Kazakh eagle hunters (Burkitshi) celebrate their heritage and compete to catch small animals such as foxes and hares with specially trained golden eagles, showing off the skills both of the birds and their trainers. Prizes are awarded for speed, agility and accuracy, as well as for the best traditional Kazakh dress, and more.[2]

Parade of eagle hunters at festival

Kazakh eagle hunter in Altai Tavan Bogd National Park, Mongolia

The Eagle Festival is held during the first weekend in October, run by the Mongolian Eagle Hunter's Association. Dark, rocky mountainous terrain forms the backdrop to the festivities, which incorporate an opening ceremony, parade, cultural exhibitions, demonstrations and handcrafts in the centre of the town of Ölgii, followed by sporting activities and competitions 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) outside of town towards the mountains. Dressed in full eagle hunting regalia and mounted on groomed decorated horses, the entrants compete for the awards of Best Turned Out Eagle and Owner; Best Eagle at Hunting Prey and Best Eagle at Locating Its Owner from a Distance. Other sporting activities include horse racing, archery and the highly entertaining Bushkashi - goatskin tug of war on horseback.

The Eagle Festival is featured in the 2016 documentary The Eagle Huntress, in which the 13-year-old Kazakh girl Aisholpan becomes the first female to enter and win the competition.

A smaller festival, the Sagsai Golden Eagle Festival on 17-18 September each year especially for photographers, cinematographers and photo journalists, and the Altai Kazakh Eagle Festival, is also held each year in the nearby village of Sagsai in the last week of September. It follows much the same pattern as the larger Golden Eagle Festival, with about 40 eagle hunters participating.[3]

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.[...] 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 how exceptional 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 weaklyand 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." 4