The wondrous life and mysterious death of Golden Eagle 1703

Golden eagles are one of the most protected species in the US - so what happens when one turns up dead in a field?

One morning toward the end of January 2019, Steve Lewis, a US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) biologist in Juneau, Alaska, logged on to the website Movebank.org to check the whereabouts of some golden eagles that he had tagged with GPS trackers.

Lewis, a lanky, outdoorsy 49-year-old, usually tried to look at the location data once a week, but he had spent most of the month at home on furlough, unable to work as a result of the government shutdown. Eager to catch up with his birds, Lewis beelined it to his office when he got back to work. "The first thing I did," he says, "was go and check on my eagle tags."