Golden Eagle Identification: Adult, Juvenile, vs Bald Eagle

• Head pattern: Adult: solid brown overall with golden feathers on the nape of the neck
• Body pattern: Immature: white patch in the center of the wing and a white base to the tail
• Flight silhouette: Long, broad wings held flat while soaring (versus a dihedral)
• Size compared with look-alikes: About the same overall size as the Bald Eagle
• Size compared with look-alikes: Compared to a young Bald Eagle, Golden Eagle looks a bit longer-tailed and smaller-headed, with a slightly smaller bill

Golden Eagle looks longer-tailed and smaller-headed with a slightly smaller bill than a young Bald Eagle; young Bald Eagles show at least a little white mottling on the body or wing-linings that Golden Eagles lack The Bald Eagle page lists its own marks.

Open mountains, foothills, plains, and open country; requires open terrain such as tundra, prairie, rangeland, or desert Found across Alaska, western Canada, California, the Great Lakes fringe, Plains, and Southwest, mostly in open western terrain; northern birds migrate mostly in late fall and early spring

Raptors are usually far away and against the sky, so expose for the bird, not the sky, and take several frames as it turns: the tail shape, wing shape and underwing pattern show best in flight. For a perched bird, get the head and chest in one frame. Size is hard to judge alone; compare with a nearby crow, gull or fence post. The app names the likely species; confirm with the marks above.

Identify a Golden Eagle by four things: an all-dark brown body with golden feathers on the back of the head, legs feathered to the feet, a relatively small head with a long tail, and, in young birds, clean white patches in the middle of the wing and at the base of the tail. Wikipedia notes the leg feathers are paler, from light golden to white, while a Bald Eagle's legs are bare of feathers lower down. At a distance, the head-to-tail proportion is the quickest check: Wikipedia says a soaring Golden Eagle's tail looks two to three times as long as its head, while in the sea eagles, the group that includes the Bald Eagle, the head projects much farther.

Age matters more than anything else, because a young Golden Eagle and a young Bald Eagle are both mostly dark.

• Juvenile Golden Eagle: white on about the first two-thirds of the tail, and often a white patch in the wing (Wikipedia). The white is sharply bordered.
• Subadult: the white shrinks year by year. Wikipedia gives full adult plumage at 5½ to 6½ years.
• Adult: solid brown with a golden nape and faint pale tail bands; no clean white patches (Audubon).
• Young Bald Eagle for comparison: dark brown overlaid with messy white streaking, reaching adult plumage in the fifth year, rarely the fourth (Wikipedia). Audubon notes young Bald Eagles show at least a little white mottling on the body or wing linings.

• Head and bill: Bald Eagles look large-headed with an obvious bill; Golden Eagles look smaller-headed (Flocking Around; Audubon).
• Tail length: Golden's tail looks two to three times the length of its head in soaring flight (Wikipedia).
• Where the white is: Golden shows clean white at the wing center and tail base only; young Bald Eagles have white in varying amounts across the body, wing linings and tail, including white armpits (Flocking Around; Wikipedia).
• Wing shape: Golden shows a pinch where the wing meets the body and tapers more; Bald has broader, straighter-edged, plank-like wings (Flocking Around; Wikipedia).
• Wing angle: Wikipedia describes Golden soaring with wings in a slight dihedral and Bald with wings held flat. Audubon's own description calls Golden's soaring wings flat, so treat a very slight lift as a supporting clue, not proof.
• Legs: feathered on Golden, bare lower legs on Bald (Wikipedia).

Flocking Around's advice is to ignore size, habitat and diet, which overlap too much, and rely on shape and the pattern of white.

• Turkey Vulture: Wikipedia separates it by its less controlled, rocking flight, slaty black-brown color and silvery secondaries on the underwing.
• Dark hawks (buteos): dark Red-tailed Hawks and other mid-sized buteos are dwarfed by a Golden Eagle. Wikipedia puts an adult female eagle at about double the wingspan and five times the weight of such a hawk.
• Young Bald Eagle: the most frequent confusion; use the six checks above.

Size is hard to judge against the sky, so compare with anything nearby of known size.

It depends where you are. Audubon estimates about 130,000 Golden Eagles and describes them as birds of open mountains, foothills, plains and open country in the West, where they are regular. In the East they are genuinely scarce: Wikipedia says Golden Eagles still breed on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec, that a pair nested in Maine until 1999, and that the species is now believed absent as a breeding bird from the eastern United States. Eastern Canadian birds winter on montane grass and heath fields of the Appalachian Plateau, especially in Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia. Audubon notes northern birds migrate mostly in late fall and early spring, which is when eastern hawk watches see them.

The Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940 was amended in 1962 to include the Golden Eagle. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act prohibits taking, possessing, selling or transporting eagles, their parts, nests, eggs and feathers without a permit, and also bans disturbing them. Wikipedia lists criminal penalties of up to $5,000 and one year in prison for a first offense and up to $10,000 and two years for a second. Enrolled Native Americans obtain feathers through the National Eagle Repository, which moved to its current Denver-area site in 1995. If you find a large dark feather, photograph it and leave it; the hawk and eagle feather page explains how to identify it.