lambs and kids that the ranchers had picked up. Operation Dead Lamb 

 they called it. They were going to see how many were actually eagle 

 killed. Well, I wasn't very satisfied with the situation because I can 

 tell you nine times out of ten on lambs up here in Montana whether 

 they're an eagle kill or something else because the lambs are not taken 

 until they are big enough. This happens when they're getting out 

 away from the ewes and kind of running around and an eagle only eats 

 about half of them and I've got wombs and hemorages and so forth left 

 to look at. But I got down there and those doggone little goat kids 

 only weighed about four pounds to start with and the nannies stash 

 them like antelope do and leave them. And, the eagles took them when 

 they were really small so they'd clean them up so much that all I had 

 was a bunch of skins punched full of holes and all I could say was 

 eagles ate them. That was about half of the material that came in. 

 There were some eagles kills but there were a lot of other things 

 brought in. Anyway, at the end of this session some newspaper people 

 came in and they were asking questions. Well, at the end of the 

 session the last lamb came over the table to me. It was a real small 

 one. It wasn't eaten but it was an obvious eagle kill right off the bat. 

 There were no if's, and's or but's. So I said, well, kind of a strange 

 eagle kill, no feeding, something must have chased it off and the ewe 

 must have bee there to protect it in the first place. So everybody 

 liked that. It turned out that it was the one they had staked out for a 

 newspaper to photograph an eagle killing and they were kind of 

 checking if this bureaucrat knew what he was talking about. 



So the newspaper man was asking me where all these eagles came 

 from that they were having trouble with in Texas. And I said, "Well, 

 we don't know a lot about eagles, it's hard to get band returns on 

 them. If somebody kills an eagle he's not too apt to come running in 

 with the band like he does on a Canada goose or something, you know. 

 We think that they're a little bit like the geese, the birds nesting in 

 the central states don't go very far, the ones nesting farther north 

 come farther south, so you're probably looking at northwest territory, 

 Yukon, southern Alaska birds here in Texas." So there was an old 

 rancher kind of taking this all in and after the newspaper people left 

 and all kind of drifted away he came up and he said "Hey, you want 

 some bands?" And I said, "Yes, it's really hard to get eagle bands 

 back. I'd like to get all we can." He says, "Well, I've got about a 

 gallon of them I could bring in." Am I telling things I shouldn't? 

 Anyway, the president of the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers was there 

 and he says, "Hey now, better not. Somebody brought a band in and 

 threw it on my desk a couple of years ago and says what are we 

 supposed to do with these?" So he said, "I left it lay there and I 

 looked at it a couple of days and finally I put it in an envelope and 

 shipped it to Maryland saying that it was brought in anonymously from 

 Brown County or something like that." 



And he said in two days he had the enforcement agents in there 

 grilling him where in the heck did that come from. It was from a 

 juvenile bald eagle that had been banded in Minnesota that year. But 

 they kind of put the fear in this fellow and he said we better not be 

 sending in any more bands. The next day a Texas rancher said "You 



