Where Do Golden Eagles Live? Range Across Three Continents

A range across three continents

The golden eagle is a Holarctic bird, found around the northern half of the globe. Its breeding range covers:

• North America: Alaska, western and northern Canada, the western United States and the mountains of northern and central Mexico.
• Europe: Scotland, Scandinavia, Spain, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Apennines, the Carpathians, the Balkans and Russia.
• Asia: Turkey and the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, the Himalayas, Tibet, Mongolia, Korea and Japan.
• Africa: the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, desert mountains from Mauritania eastward, and a tiny isolated group in Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains, the southern limit of the species.

The IUCN estimates this range at well over 100 million square kilometers. Within it, though, eagles are patchy: they are common in wild, open areas and missing from large parts of crowded lowland Europe and the eastern US.

What habitat do golden eagles need?

Golden eagles are adaptable, but every territory needs two things: wide open ground to hunt over and safe sites to nest. Typical habitats include:

Nests are built on cliff ledges where possible, or in large trees where cliffs are scarce. They are not purely mountain birds: where the land is open and quiet, they breed in lowlands too. They are, however, generally absent from the hottest true deserts.

Altitude is no barrier. In Tibet and the Himalayas golden eagles live above 2,500 m (8,200 ft), and one was seen circling at about 6,190 m (20,310 ft) near Mount Everest.

Golden eagles in North America

In North America, golden eagles are birds of the West. They nest from Alaska and the Yukon through the Rockies, the Great Basin and California to central Mexico, where the eagle on the national flag is based on this species. An estimated 40,000 or so live in the western United States.

The eastern US is a different story. Golden eagles once nested in the Appalachians and New England, but the last known pair, in Maine, stopped breeding around the end of the 1990s. Today, eagles that breed in northern Quebec and Labrador migrate south to spend the winter in the Appalachian ridges of Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, and along the coast. GPS tracking and camera traps have shown this winter population is larger than birdwatchers once thought.

Northern birds are true migrants. Each autumn thousands follow the Rocky Mountains south past Alberta, riding the ridge updrafts. To tell them from America’s other large eagle, see bald eagle vs golden eagle.

Golden eagles in Europe and the British Isles

In central and southern Europe, golden eagles live almost entirely in the big mountain ranges, nesting near the tree line and hunting alpine pastures. The Alps are now so full that pairs fight more often over territory. Our guide to the animals of the Alps covers where to look.

Scotland is Britain’s stronghold. A national survey in 2015 counted 508 pairs, up 15 percent since 2003, mostly in the Highlands and islands, from Skye and the Outer Hebrides to the Cairngorms. England lost its last resident bird, a lone male in the Lake District, in 2015, and none breed in Wales.

Two projects aim to bring eagles back to lost ground. In Ireland, where golden eagles died out in the early 1900s, young birds from Scotland have been released in Glenveagh National Park, County Donegal, since 2001. In the south of Scotland, young eagles have been moved from the Highlands since 2018 to boost a tiny remnant population. Read more in wildlife of Scotland.

Why golden eagles disappeared from some areas

The golden eagle was once far more widespread. From the 1800s onward it was shot, trapped and poisoned across Europe and North America, often because it was seen as a threat to lambs and gamebirds. Farming and forestry also turned open hunting ground into fields and dense plantations, and disturbance at nests drove pairs away.

Legal protection has helped many populations recover or stabilize, but illegal killing, lead poisoning, collisions with wind turbines and electrocution on power lines still limit numbers. Eagles return only slowly, because young birds tend to settle near where they were raised and do not breed until they are four to seven years old.