WARNING: This story and the accompanying images may be graphic to some readers.
‘How often do you get a feather from a live bird?’
“Today’s rat day,” said Terrence Mull. “It’s the best job in the world, so I’m blessed to be here. You know, a lot of people, they don’t get to see this every day.”
He’s talking about atsá, or the Navajo word for eagle.
Mull has managed the Navajo Nation Zoo’s 4,000-square-foot Eagle Aviary and Education Center since its opening in 2016. This facility is touted as the only tribally owned and operated zoo nationwide. It doesn’t buy or trade animals since almost all of them are injured or orphaned on Navajoland.
More than a tourist attraction nestled in the capital of Window Rock, it’s also a living resource, and one of only a few spots in the U.S. where eagle feathers are legally gathered for distribution. The center currently houses 18 injured golden eagles that can no longer return to the wild.
“A lot of cleanup,” Mull added. “But, you know, I don’t mind. It’s part of the job.”
He also doesn’t mind handling frozen rodents.
They’re shipped into Window Rock on a semitruck every six months. Each golden eagle gets a white-haired rat with a pair of beet red eyes. Mull thaws them out in the morning before slicing them open across the belly with a kitchen knife. As he dumps rat guts into a metal bucket, the smell is almost unbearable.
Mull has fileted his fair share of rats.
“Thousands of times in almost 10 years,” he said, adding that the odor is more than what visitors can muster to stand: “They’ll never step foot in here again.”
Mull is ready serve them up on a silver platter — or in this case — a plastic cutting board. Diced-up rodents are part of their diet, supplemented with portions of quail and frozen blocks of meat.
Every raptor eats less than half a pound of meat daily.
“Well, they probably smell it,” said Mull, who tossed the sliced rodents onto wooden planks and perches in the air with precision within the eagle enclosure.
He never missed.
Every day before he begins meal prep, Mull looks around the dirt floor for any fallen feathers, which he gathers from the ground.
The zoo, run by the Navajo Fish and Wildlife Department, then freely distributes them to anyone enrolled in a federally recognized tribe. Eagles molt, or shed feathers, annually following the breeding season between April and September.
“It means a lot to us, because everything we do, from our science to feathers, to even having this place available, is education for our youth,” Mull said. “That’s the main thing here, having our children learn about their animals on the Navajo Nation first, before they go learn about giraffes and elephants at a much bigger zoo.”
While the Colorado-based National Eagle Repository is overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and serves as a clearinghouse for the religious and cultural use of eagle parts by Indigenous communities nationwide, the Navajo Nation Zoo has secured special permissions from that same federal agency.
More than 10,500 eagle feathers have been gifted to 1,800 people since 2012, when the Fish and Wildlife Service granted the Navajo Nation federal permits to distribute naturally shed feathers.
They started with four golden eagles. That service wasn’t initially advertised back then, because the zoo didn’t want to get overwhelmed and run out of feathers within a few days.
Traditional Diné medicine men like Anderson Hoskin depend on this unique aviary, “because, you know, how often do you get a feather from a live bird?”
“If I’m walking, I’ll stop by, take my corn pollen, and I’ll pray to the eagles,” said Hoskin, appointed member of Diné spiritual ceremonial knowledge at Diné College. “There’s a story and songs that go with it, too.”
'They take the message back to the highest heavens'
The Diné, also known as the Holy People, are supposed to be the protectors of the great protectors. Eagles are seen as animals that ward off evil spirits and even possess special healing powers and properties.
Eagle Way is a healing ceremony — rarely performed today — that uses eagle feathers. It typically takes five days, and the Diné believe this custom can mend wounds.
“Everything has its purpose on this Earth,” Hoskin said. “They take the message back to the highest heavens, and they’re the ones that can carry your sickness.”
But possessing an eagle feather has been prohibited since 1940 by the Bald Eagle Protection Act. The law was amended in 1962 to include golden eagles. Both species are also protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.
Latest counts estimate that there are more than 316,000 bald eagles and 30,000 golden eagles nationwide. But the size and scale of the black market for these species is still unknown.
Social media has added a level of sophistication to the commercial exploitation of America’s national bird. That has made it harder for federal officials to detect and stop these sales. Eagles are often killed in the process.
The Procuraduría Federal de Protección al Ambiente, or Mexico’s Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection, also known as Profepa, has seized nine golden eagles between 2014 and 2022, according to a recent report by the Center for Biological Diversity.
Meanwhile, Fish and Wildlife Service agents have documented almost 90 violations of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act between 2006 and 2016.
Most recently, Travis John Branson, a 48-year-old man from Cusick, Washington, pleaded guilty in March to several federal charges, including conspiracy, wildlife trafficking and trafficking bald and golden eagles.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and Flathead Tribal Law Enforcement conducted the investigation.
Branson and his co-conspirators are responsible for slaughtering more than 3,600 birds, including 118 eagles and 107 hawks, in the name of profit. A suspected accomplice named Simon Paul, whom Branson texted back and forth with about possibly shooting a baby eagle, is believed to no longer be in the U.S. and remains at large.
This is part of an elaborate trafficking scheme in the West.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Montana stated that Johnson traveled from Washington to kill bald and golden eagles on the 1.3-million-acre Flathead Reservation, home to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, in northwestern Montana.
Then, he sold them on the black market.
Court documents reveal text messages from Branson, describing his own efforts as going “on a killing spree,” taking up to nine eagles at any given time. The report also states that he earned between $180,000 and $360,000 from 2009 to 2021.
The federal court’s briefing argued that Branson “enjoyed and bragged about the number of eagles he killed,” showing “zero remorse” through his text messages. Branson hacked eagle parts up, and even searched for a baby eagle.
'There still is a black market for feathers'
He’ll be sentenced later this month, and prosecutors want him to pay nearly $800,000 in restitution — $5,000 for every dead eagle and $1,750 for every dead hawk — and serve “significant” prison time.
At the same time, the Hopi Tribe has secured federal permits from the Fish and Wildlife Service allowing them to capture and sacrifice nestling golden eaglets as part of their rituals and religious observances.
So there are exceptions to the rule.
Violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act can carry a $100,000 fine and a year in person for a first offense. But members of federally recognized tribes are exempt, thanks to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, so long as there isn’t any exchange of currency and the feathers are acquired legally.
Mull believed that the zoo would begin worrying if medicine men, like Hoskin, stopped searching for feathers. That would signal to him: “All of the elders must be gone.”
“It’s not easy to get a legal eagle feather, and that’s the thing,” said Navajo Nation Zoo manager David Mikesic. “There still is a black market for feathers. But for Native Americans, it’s legal to possess feathers. That also means that you can’t shoot or go after an eagle just for its feathers or something like that. That’s still illegal.”
But this is a common problem on the Navajo Nation.
In 2018, a bald eagle and two golden eagles were shot at the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry in Farmington, New Mexico. Their tail feathers were plucked. Another golden eagle was shot a year later, at that same spot, and found with missing tail feathers, too.
Half of them died from their injuries. One of the surviving golden eagle’s wings had been amputated at the wrist, but it could no longer be released to the wild. The Fish and Wildlife Service had been tasked with investigating all of these incidents.
These tail feathers are the most coveted, but they’re also finite. Essentially this is an issue of supply and demand. Each eagle can shed its 12 tail feathers during the annual molt, replacing this plumage for flight and insulation.
“Twelve tail feathers times 18 eagles, that gives us the potential for 216 tail feathers a year. That’s the most,” Mikesic explained. “Probably 10 to 16 of those might be damaged that I wouldn’t feel good about giving out. Generally, some of our birds are missing part of their wings. That’s why they’re here.”
Mikesic shared that three out of every four applicants want tail feathers.
But applicants are entitled to ask for a maximum of two flight feathers annually. They’re also able to access up to four body feathers and plumes. “If we had twice the number of eagles that were injured, needed a home and had a second sanctuary to fit them in, we could probably give out that number of feathers, too.”
Mikesic handles these requests.
It’s a two-week process, but he’s made exceptions. A medicine man had just come by and needed to gather feathers for a weekend ceremony. He had his CIB, or certificate of Indian blood, card for proof of enrollment and a driver’s license, so Mikesic expedited that process.
“It really hit home. A lot of people apply just to have feathers, and that’s fine,” Mikesic explained. “But to have a medicine man that actually uses the feathers for the benefit of others, it’s a tremendous resource for the Navajo Nation.”
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Animals are hit on the road, seized after illegal hunting or euthanized by the state. The department then works with tribes who use them for ceremonial purposes, instead of disposing of the carcasses. -
Wildlife conservation efforts, in part, criminalized Indigenous customs, but also led to a thriving global black market for wildlife parts. To counteract that illicit industry, a Phoenix nonprofit has been providing an alternative, legal source of feathers for tribal members in Arizona and nationwide.
