Ulla Hesvang can tell an eagle's visit from the mesh alone. Weather and goats tear a net in ragged holes the size of a bucket. The giant eagle makes a long straight slot where the edge of one wing dragged through, and the cut cord ends are crushed flat rather than parted. She runs her palm down such a tear every few weeks. She is a lid-stringer, one of nine in the Fjellmark valley, and the trade exists because the sky would otherwise take lambs faster than the farms can breed them. A lidded yard is a lambing pen roofed in hemp net on cedar poles, forty feet to a side. A good lid lasts three seasons.
Her day starts at the Dyrnes yards with a bag of spare cord and a bone netting needle. She walks the poles, testing knots with a thumbnail, and by ten she has rehung two sagging panels. She does not whistle. No one works the lidded yards whistling, because the pitch is close to an eaglet's begging call, and the old rule is that an adult will come down to answer it. Children there are taught to hum. At midday she eats rye bread under the poles, with the shadow of the mesh lying in squares across her boots.
The eagle comes over a little after noon. It does not circle. It slides down the valley wall on flat wings, dark chestnut above, with a rust-gold nape and a white blaze across the crown, and its shadow crosses the yard before the sound of air does. The ewes press against the far fence. Ulla keeps her eyes on the net. Overhead the bird tilts, and the right foot hangs open: the hind talon is broken to a blunt stub, while the other three are as long as sickle blades. Then it is past. I have measured only one of its feathers, a primary Ulla keeps on a shed rafter. A mason's tape gave four feet one inch from quill to tip. Set against the width of the slots in her nets, that puts the span near twenty-four feet.
Afternoon is for pellets. Below the shelf on Dyrnes Ridge the scree is strewn with gray wool wads the size of loaves, and Ulla reads them the way a farmer reads a field. Fresh ones mean the bird is working the near pastures, so she tightens the nets on that side first. The valley tracks the eagle by its wool, not by the bird. By five it is back on the shelf with a yearling ram hanging from its feet. It sets the animal on the rock whole and does not eat it. Every shepherd on the ridge has found these rams, cold by morning, the fleece unmarked. Why a bird that hunts all day carries off what it will not eat is a question nobody has answered.
- Classification
- Colossal solitary raptor
- Habitat
- Cliff shelves above high valleys
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 24 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Mountain valleys and crag country
- Binomial
- Aquila vastipennis
- Diet
- Sheep, goats, deer, large fish
- Temperament
- Aloof, territorial, patient