Updated March 01, 2025 at 05:00 AM ET
It's an hour before sunrise on a January morning, and five below zero at this small clearing in the Maine woods. Wildlife researchers Trish Miller and Mike Lanzone are kneeling in the snow, pounding stakes to secure a bow net.
"Those springs that it's attaching to, that's what causes the bow to spring over the eagle," says Lanzone. "The trigger will attach after everything is kind of in place."
The New Jersey couple came to midcoast Maine to trap what they call a ghost of the eastern forest – a golden eagle. The huge raptors are conspicuous in the wide-open American west, but in the east they are surprisingly secretive.
"Hardly anybody realizes they're here," says Miller, a wildlife biologist at Conservation Science Global who has been studying the eagles for two decades. "We don't know how many are here, maybe 5,000 is our guess right now, but somehow 5,000 eagles pass into the eastern U.S., and very few are seen by humans."
Research by Miller and Lanzone and their colleagues in the Eastern Golden Eagle Working Group shows that the eagles breed in eastern Canada, and winter as far south as Alabama, and even Florida.
This spot seems promising because a trail camera has documented an eagle on a bait pile that a coyote hunter keeps in the woods here. After setting the trap, they settle into a nearby blind for a long, cold wait.
Golden eagles used to breed in the Northeastern U.S., but suffered from habitat changes, and the lingering effects of the insecticide DDT. Erynn Call, a raptor biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, says the last known pair was here in Maine.
"So they were last present as a breeding pair in 1996," Call says, "and then they were gone in 1997."
In 2024, Call started a project to learn more about golden eagles, and was surprised to get trail-camera photos at 13 sites in Maine. She says they are easily confused with a more common bird.
"Young bald eagles, so bald eagles that are less than five years old, look very similar to golden eagles," Call says. "So a lot of people think they're seeing golden eagles when in fact it's a bald eagle."
Lanzone and Miller sat in the blind from dark to dark that first day, serenaded by barred owls, pileated woodpeckers, and some curious ravens. But they get only a brief glimpse of an eagle flying by.
Then the next day, in late afternoon Miller quietly takes out her phone to text Call to say, "He just flew to a tree right above the bait."
The next text simply reads, "Got him."
Call and several colleagues rush to the clearing to help.
They find Miller holding a huge eagle, deep brown with golden highlights on the nape of its neck, and talons powerful enough to kill sandhill cranes, and even small deer. After placing a leather hood over its head, the team weighs and measures the bird, bands its leg, and takes blood samples.
They strap a small backpack topped with a tiny solar panel onto the bird's back. It's a GPS unit that will log the eagle's movements. (Lanzone actually builds these units at his company Cellular Tracking Technologies.) He and Miller have tagged golden eagles in many states, but never in Maine.
"This is the first one that I know of that's been telemetered in Maine," he says.
"This is the first time, very exciting," Call says, "and it's exciting because it might have different behaviors than any other birds that have trapped elsewhere."
"Yes, exactly," Miller says, "it's a very different habitat up here than the birds we've caught in Alabama or Arkansas, or even Pennsylvania or Virginia."
Then Miller holds the bird as Lanzone removes its hood. The golden eagle looks around in the fading afternoon light, then flies silently to a tall pine and disappears into the shadows.
Copyright 2025 NPR