Beneath the Dragoon Mountains, down a primitive forest road lined with pistachio trees and scattered homesteads, sits the 800-acre Cochise Stronghold Ranch. There, Kalen Pearson, an Arizona Raptor Center master eagle falconer, places jackrabbit remains on a wooden perch and calls out: “Ava … Ava … Ava.”
Before long, Ava appears above a nearby ridgeline. Over the next minute, she makes her descent, her chocolate-brown plumage gleaming in the midday sun as she glides. Once she’s at ground level, she wastes no time snatching her “prey” with her talons before returning to the sky.
For more than 10,000 years, various peoples, including Mogollon farmers and bands of Apaches, have sought refuge in this corner of Southeastern Arizona. Now, the Cochise Stronghold Ranch is providing refuge of a different kind. Since the mid-2000s, Douglas and Roma Payne have owned and managed the property, and in June 2024, the couple partnered with the Arizona Raptor Center to begin hosting a new kind of visitor — the golden eagle — at a “hack site” believed to be the only one of its type in the United States.
The raptor center began to take shape in 2017, when master eagle falconers Jerry Ostwinkle (pictured at a different location in Arizona) and Stacy Westerholm, volunteers for the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s Adobe Mountain Wildlife Center, sought to fill a need when it came to rehabilitating birds of prey. Ultimately, the pair co-founded a unique facility that places falconers in rehabilitative roles. “We decided [the staff] had to be falconers, because they know these birds of prey better than anyone else in the world,” Westerholm says. “They know techniques that have been passed down for thousands of years.”
Since its inception, the center’s Phoenix-based surgical facility has cared for a variety of sick and injured birds of prey, and the nonprofit center has built a statewide network of 40 volunteer falconers who receive supplies from Ostwinkle and Westerholm to support and stabilize raptors in their respective cities.
But when it came to rescuing golden eagles, the center needed a site with wind patterns and mountainous terrain that matched the birds’ natural habitat. Those factors made the Cochise Stronghold Ranch an ideal site for “hacking,” a 3,000-year-old falconry technique that allows fledgling eagles to master flight and build strength while having their nutritional needs supported. Ava is one of four juvenile or orphaned golden eagles the center has successfully hacked since the site opened last summer. “We’re the only facility in the United States that does this,” Ostwinkle says.
Hacking differs from other traditional rehabilitation methods in that it involves concerted efforts to prevent the birds from imprinting on their caretakers. “The birds that come into this hack site are usually about 50 to 65 days old, have just hopped out of the nest” and have been separated from their parents, Pearson says. “The oversight and semi-controlled independence with their parents is exactly what we emulate here.”
The process starts with treating the birds for illnesses such as aspergillosis or injuries such as gunshot wounds. Then, the raptors work on rebuilding their muscle mass. “We use a lot of falconry techniques that they don’t use in a lot of rehab situations,” Pearson says. “We teach them how to chase their food [while] going away from us. Everything that we do is based on how the birds would naturally act in the wild.”
As the birds progress in their rehabilitation, they visit the hack site less frequently, start soaring more and demonstrate more discomfort around humans, Pearson adds. In short, the wilder they act, the better. On the day that Pearson calls out to Ava, she’s been flying freely for 107 days and, according to Ostwinkle and Westerholm, showing the agility and strength that will allow her to migrate with other eagles. Eventually, like so many raptors before her, she’ll take flight and leave the ranch for the final time.