Eagle Festival – a Day Trip Ulaanbaatar

Eagle Festival – a Day Trip Ulaanbaatar

It’s an annual event which has been successfully organized since 1999. The general or the biggest Festival takes place in Western Mongolia, Bayan-Ulgii province on the first weekend of October each year. But in the recent years in order to make it available for most of the travelers, local communities and tour agencies started to organize other probably smaller scale Eagle Festival annually in Ulaanbaatar and obviously Ulgii city which is the home falconers. We would like to provide you opportunities to be the part of this rare cultural event.

Itinerary
This is a typical itinerary for this product

Stop At: Töv, Mongolia

Each year some numbers of falconers travel from for West of Mongolia to cherish their unique culture and tradition of training and hunting with eagles. The Festival is consists of several kinds of contests majorly to evaluate the training skills of falconers and finesse of eagles to hunt. Oftentimes prey of those eagles are steppe foxes, rabbits and other small cats and wolves. Skill contests are held all day long together with other traditional games such as coin picking up or kokpar (literally meaning goat pulling). Over the course of the game, horse mounted young Kazakh men will attempt to place a goat or sheep carcass. Whoever catches the goat first shall bring it behind the predefined line whilst other competitors will try their best to snatch it from him. During the festival, some local crafts women will also present their art works such as bags, pillow cases, wall hangings, traditional fox fur hats and so on.
• Opening speeches given by organizers and honored guests. Morning parade of Eagle hunters with their traditional hunting outfits and gears. Following the parade, first game of the Eagle call or Shakiru will be started. Masters will place their eagles above on the hill and will call them either their arms or within predefined circle for better score by standing down the hill.
• Afternoon break. Lunch picnic
• Flying Eagles for Shirga. Shirga is one of the training methods before taking the bird for the actual hunting. Master will drag an animal fur attached to a rope on horseback, whilst the hide is being drawn; when the bird sees form above the hill, it as its prey and will dive onto it. Later winner falconers will be awarded prizes of honor.


Duration: 8 hours