The golden eagle that led a stalker to his stag

A golden eagle that flew at a stalker’s face, then circled the same patch of long grass three times, turned out to be marking the exact spot where a red stag lay hidden. Writing in Sporting Gun, Steve Connolly describes the encounter on a private west-coast Highland estate during the annual stag cull as “the most extraordinary experience I’ve ever had while out stalking”, and it ends with a stag named after the all-terrain vehicle whose tyres its antlers punctured.

For anyone who stalks or keeps on the hill, the story sits on familiar ground. Connolly had heard of ravens circling above groups of hinds in anticipation of a gralloch, something his friend Bill, the estate’s headstalker, had witnessed for himself. An eagle appearing to do the same, and then waiting 30m off for its share, is something few will have seen.

What happened on the hilltop?

Connolly was helping Bill during the cull a couple of years ago. It was, he writes, “a glorious autumn day – warm, bright and completely still”, in an unusually hot week for October with neither wind nor rain. By mid-morning the pair had stopped on a hilltop with 360-degree views across the estate: a Site of Special Scientific Interest of ancient woodland running down to the sea below them, and the islands of Mull and Coll clear beyond. With the temperature climbing, very little was moving; most animals had taken to the shade of the woodland or the bracken.

Bill walked the mile or so back to bring the Argo closer, leaving Connolly to glass the hillsides. About 10 minutes later he picked up a golden eagle riding the thermals at roughly his own height, perhaps 200m away. Eagles are reasonably common on that part of the Highlands, he notes, with as many as seven seen soaring overhead at once, “but they never fail to impress”.

Why did the eagle fly straight at him?

The bird gradually closed the distance and then came directly at him. “It came so close that I instinctively raised my hands to protect my face, convinced it was about to strike,” Connolly writes. “At the very last moment it flared its wings, stopped almost dead in the air no more than 5m away, then banked sharply and soared away to my right.”

It then circled over lower ground some 250m away, still at his eye level. There could be no young in a nest in October, and Bill knew every nesting site on the estate; there were none in that area. The eagle repeated the manoeuvre three times. On the third pass, studying the ground beneath it, Connolly caught sight of pale antler tips protruding above the long grass.

“Had it happened just once, I would have dismissed it as coincidence,” he writes. “But three times, with exactly the same manoeuvre over precisely the same spot? I couldn’t ignore it.” He kept his eyes fixed on the antler tips and waited.

How was the stag taken?

About 20 minutes later the stag stood up, shook himself, stretched and began making his way back towards the woodland. The distance was at the very limit of what Connolly was prepared to shoot, but he had “a rock-solid rest, a broadside presentation and not the slightest breath of wind”. He squeezed the trigger and the stag dropped, disappearing into the long grass.

He waited five minutes to be certain there was no movement and to fix the exact location in his mind, then took the best part of half an hour to negotiate the rocky slope and cross the rough meadow. As he approached, the eagle was there again, standing on a grassy hummock some 30m away, quietly watching. The stag was an impressive beast, big-bodied, with antlers of an unusual rich caramel brown. As Connolly carried out the gralloch the eagle “hopped expectantly from foot to foot”, and no sooner had he and Bill loaded the stag and pulled away than it descended onto what they had left behind.

Where does the name Argo come from?

Trundling back across the estate with two stags aboard, Connolly’s and another Bill had taken, the pair struck a hidden rut in the track. The impact threw the head and neck of Connolly’s stag over the side of the vehicle, and the antlers neatly punctured two tyres. “Standing there surveying the damage, we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” he writes. “From that moment on, my stag acquired the nickname Argo.”

The antlers now hang on his wall above a small brass plaque bearing the name, and on the estate directions are still given as “carry on another half a mile past where Argo was shot”. Connolly accepts that many readers will think it impossible that an eagle led him to the stag. “All I can say is what I saw for myself,” he writes, adding that the day is “a reminder that deerstalking has always been about far more than simply pulling the trigger”.

What does it mean for stalkers on the hill?

For the professional stalker and the keeper running an autumn cull on ground shared with golden eagles, Connolly’s account is a reminder of how closely the hill’s scavengers watch what a rifle and an Argo mean. A gralloch left on the ground is a meal claimed within minutes, and on this estate at least one eagle seems to have learned to anticipate it. Connolly, who hosts the Stalkers Tales podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, makes no larger claim than what he saw; the stag, and the spot where he shot it, are now part of the estate’s vocabulary.