BBC Natural World · PBS Nova
Super Powered Eagles
Known as Eagle Power on PBS Nova. Tilly, and a flight over California.
The film
A film made by people who had worked together for years, and one bird at the centre of it.
Super Powered Eagles — Eagle Power on PBS Nova — was a special one. It went out on BBC Two on Friday 20 March 2020, made with the same team we had worked with on Superfast Falcons. The film balances Tilly against a pair of wild eagles in the United States.
The whole documentary rested on my relationship with Tilly, our golden eagle. You do not build that kind of trust in a season; it is decades of daily work, and it is the only reason the camera could get where it got.
It also gave me something I will never have again: paragliding alongside wild golden eagles in California. A once in a lifetime opportunity, and one of the great days of my working life.
Lloyd and Tilly in Glenveagh National Park, Donegal, 2010. Photograph © John Waters.
Watch
Clips from the film
Clips are hosted on YouTube by BBC Earth, and the US preview on Facebook. They are only loaded when you press play, so nothing is requested from YouTube or Facebook, and no third-party cookies are set, until you choose to watch. See the whole BBC Earth playlist →
Scotland
The hare that ran on motors
We wanted to see how a golden eagle actually catches something on the ground. You cannot ask a wild eagle to do the same thing twice, and you certainly cannot ask a real hare, so Chris Watts built us one.
It ran on motors, and fast ones, under a fake fur coat so it read as an animal rather than a machine. It could sit dead still in the undergrowth and then break across open ground, which is the part that matters — a hare that only ever runs in a straight line at a steady speed teaches you nothing. There was a camera on board as well, so we could watch the whole thing from the hare’s point of view.
That is the whole reason for building one. A machine will do it again, and again, and again, exactly the same way, so you can change a single thing and see what it does to her. Strong wind. Flat grey cloud. Hard sunlight. None of it made the slightest difference.
Watching her come in is what stays with you. She reads the wind the whole way down and keeps adjusting, legs tucked in tight; then about a quarter of a second before she arrives she swings her feet forward so she can see the hare and her own talons at the same time. She does not misjudge it.
Then we made it harder. The hare weighs 5.8 kilos, half again what Tilly weighs. She caught it, lifted it clean into the air, and carried it in one foot.
On the hill in Scotland.
California
Learning to read the air
I have watched Tilly read the air for years without ever really understanding what she was reading. So I went to California and learned to fly a paraglider with Michael Vergalla, who flies out there alongside wild birds of prey.
Two things hold you up. Thermals, where the sun warms the ground, the ground warms the air above it, and that warm air rises in a column. And the lift along a ridge, where the wind meets a hillside and has nowhere to go but up. Tilly finds both without a thought. Doing it myself, slowly and badly, is the closest I have come to understanding her.
Paragliding in California. Frame from Natural World: Super Powered Eagles, BBC Earth.
The bird
Tilly
Tilly has a two metre wingspan, and the scale is the point. A golden eagle in frame reads as wilderness in a way that nothing smaller does.
She works in a studio, where the light and the background can be built around her, and she works on the open hill. She has flown over the Scottish moors for years, and she has carried our on-board camera as well.
None of it is done afterwards. She flies in real time, at full speed, to camera — nothing slowed down, nothing composited. That only works because she has been with us her whole life. A bird will not do this for a stranger.
She is still the one people ask about most.
Tilly.
At a glance
Production
BBC Natural World · BBC Two
US title
Eagle Power · PBS Nova
Bird
Tilly, female golden eagle
Behind it
Decades, not seasons
The trust that makes these shots possible is built over a working lifetime, not a shooting schedule.
A crew that knew each other
The same team as Superfast Falcons. Less explaining, more filming.
Wild eagles, California
Paragliding alongside wild golden eagles — a once in a lifetime opportunity.
On air
“My relationship with Tilly is what made the whole documentary possible.”
Lloyd Buck
Contact
Lloyd Buck
lloyd@lloydbuck.co.uk
077603 90917
Jo Sarsby Personal Management
talks@josarsby.com
Talks and personal appearances
Where we are
North Somerset, United Kingdom.
We travel worldwide for filming.