Golden Eagle Audubon Annual Banquet

Join Golden Eagle Audubon Society (GEAS) for a night of great food, wonderful auction items, good company, a special guest speaker, and delicious desserts to raise funds for a great cause! This year we are also excited to hist this annual event at the renown Riverside Hotel.

We are pleased to have Lauren McGough as our keynote speaker for the evening. Lauren McGough will present her program titled, “Life as a Mongolian Eagle Hunter and the Role of Falconry in Eagle Conservation.” McGough has been a licensed and practicing falconer since age 14. She has been particularly enamored with golden eagles as hunting partners, a unique branch of falconry that has only a handful of practitioners in the United States. After spending nearly two years as an exchange student in the United Kingdom, and learning learning the strong European tradition of eagle falconry, she graduated from the University of Oklahoma with dual degrees in zoology and international studies. In 2009, she was a Fulbright Scholar to Mongolia, where she apprenticed herself to local eagle masters and trained eagles for hunting foxes on horseback. She loved Kazakh eagle culture so much that she earned a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Most of all, McGough has enjoyed bringing the eagle training techniques she’s learned abroad back to her home country, where she teaches golden eagles in need of rehabilitation how to hunt on the great plains. The past two years she has also been using this technique to rehabilitate eagles in South Africa.

We hope you’ll join us for this annual event, which raises funds for numerous GEAS programs, including our field trips, education, Native Plant Network, New Roots and Blacks Creek Bird Reserve.River