Burkitchi Apprenticeship: How a Kazakh Boy or Girl Becomes an Eagle Hunter

Becoming a Kazakh burkitchi (eagle hunter) is a years-long family apprenticeship, not a course or a profession one applies for. A child grows up beside the father’s eagle on its perch, learns to ride a horse before learning to read, and gradually takes on more of the daily care of the bird until they are trusted to handle one of their own. UNESCO documents the practice as one transmitted from generation to generation through mentoring within families, a structure that has produced families of seven or more generations of hunters in Bayan-Ölgii. Today the apprenticeship pipeline supports roughly 250 active berkutchi in western Mongolia, and the question of who carries the tradition forward is now one of its central concerns.

What Apprenticeship Actually Means in This Tradition

A Kazakh burkitchi apprenticeship is not a fixed programme with a syllabus and a graduation date. It is the lived experience of growing up in a household where a working golden eagle sits on a perch in the corner, where the father returns from the cliffs with an eaglet, and where the language of falconry is the family’s daily vocabulary.

UNESCO’s documentation of falconry — which lists Mongolia and Kazakhstan among 24 States Parties since the 2021 expansion — describes the transmission method directly: the practice is passed “from generation to generation through a variety of means, including through mentoring, within families or in training clubs.” For the Kazakh communities of Bayan-Ölgii, the family is the training club. Knowledge is transferred by demonstration, by handing the child a glove, and by years of observation.

This is also why the apprenticeship is hard to formalise or transplant. A child raised in Ulaanbaatar cannot become a burkitchi through a weekend course; the apprenticeship requires the cliffs, the horses, the seasons, and the family that holds the accumulated knowledge.

The First Years — Growing Up Beside the Eagle

The earliest stage of an apprenticeship is invisible. A Kazakh child in an eagle-hunting family grows up around the bird from infancy. The eagle is part of the household — fed daily, weighed, hooded for travel, taken out to fly. The child watches.

Apprenticeship stage	Typical activity	What is being learned
Childhood	Daily proximity to the family eagle	Bird behaviour, fear management, household routines
Pre-teen	Riding instruction, helping with bird care	Horsemanship, weight management, basic glove handling
Teenage	Accompanying father on hunts, handling bird under supervision	Field judgment, hunting cycle, terrain reading
Late teens / young adult	Capture and conditioning of own first eagle	Independent falconry, full responsibility

This table reflects the broad shape of family transmission documented by ethnographers and confirmed by UNESCO’s framing of mentored, family-based heritage transfer. Specific timing varies hunter by hunter and family by family — there is no fixed graduation age.

The documentary The Eagle Huntress brought one example into public view. The film follows Aisholpan, a 13-year-old Kazakh girl from Mongolia, who attempts to become the first female to enter the eagle festival competition. The men in her family have been eagle hunters for seven generations. The “seven generations” detail is what matters here: the apprenticeship pipeline does not begin with the trainee. It begins with whichever ancestor first took an eagle from the cliffs, and continues through the descendants who carry the knowledge forward.

The Horse Before the Bird

In any Kazakh hunting tradition, the horse comes first. The Wikipedia overview of hunting with eagles notes that the falconry custom involves hunting with golden eagles on horseback, and primarily targets red foxes and corsac foxes. The hunter rides into rough country with an eagle on his glove. If the rider cannot control the horse, the bird is unsafe and the hunt is impossible.

For an apprentice, this means learning to ride competently before being trusted to handle a working eagle in the field. Mongolian and Kazakh children commonly learn to ride from early childhood — long before the eagle apprenticeship begins in any formal sense. The horse is not an accessory to eagle hunting; it is the platform from which eagle hunting is conducted.

The combined skill is unusual. A skilled equestrian who is not a falconer can ride. A skilled falconer who is not an equestrian can fly birds at the lure. Only a burkitchi does both at speed, in the high country, while keeping a 5-kilogram bird balanced on a gloved fist.

Handling, Training, and the First Eagle

Once an apprentice is trusted around the family eagle, the next layer of training is technical falconry. The Britannica entry on falconry sets out the universal principle: the key to a hawk’s training is conditioning, which means finding the correct flying weight; an overweight hawk will be comparatively wild. Birds progress through manning (acceptance of the falconer), glove-feeding, flights on a creance (a long lightweight training line), and finally to free flight at the lure or live game.

For a Kazakh apprentice, learning this involves daily participation in the care of the family bird. The apprentice learns to weigh the eagle each day, to read her body language, to recognise when she is ready to fly and when she needs rest. These skills cannot be taught from a book; they accumulate.

The transition moment in a burkitchi apprenticeship is the apprentice’s own first eagle. The bird is taken from a cliff nest — almost always a female, because female golden eagles are 26 to 37 percent heavier than males and have longer wings, giving them the striking power needed for fox and hare. The apprentice now becomes a working hunter, with full responsibility for the bird’s training, feeding, hunting, and eventual release.

Daughters as Apprentices — The Recent Shift

Historically, Kazakh eagle hunting in Mongolia has been a male tradition. The Wikipedia documentation of Berkutchi consistently uses male pronouns. The ethnographic record describes father-to-son transmission. Aisholpan’s documentary subtitle — that she became the first female to enter the festival competition — only carries weight against this background.

In the 2010s the pattern began to change. Aisholpan’s success at the Ulgii Golden Eagle Festival was widely reported and prompted other Kazakh families to consider training their daughters. The shift is partial and recent. Most active berkutchi today are still men. But the apprenticeship itself — the years of horse riding, daily care of the bird, observation of the father — is no longer exclusive to sons in every family.

For visiting travellers this can be a confusing detail. The image of the eagle hunter that has reached international audiences via the Aisholpan documentary suggests women hunters are common; on the ground in Bayan-Ölgii, a female hunter remains the exception, not the norm. Both facts are true at the same time.

The Numbers and the Question of Succession

The total number of active berkutchi in Bayan-Ölgii is small. Wikipedia’s overview of falconry estimates “a little over 300 active falconers using eagles in Central Asia, with 250 in western Mongolia, 50 in Kazakhstan, and smaller numbers in Kyrgyzstan and western China.” The Berkutchi entry confirms the same figure for Bayan-Ölgii specifically.

These are not large numbers. Two hundred and fifty active hunters means perhaps a few hundred apprentices in active training at any given time, distributed across an enormous pastoral region. Modern pressures — urban migration, formal schooling that requires children to live away from the steppe, declining herding economies — affect every nomadic tradition in Mongolia, and burkitchi families are no exception.

The succession question is what makes the apprenticeship pipeline the central concern of the heritage. An eagle can be replaced from a wild nest. A trained hunter cannot. Once the chain of mentorship from father to apprentice is broken in a family, the specific knowledge accumulated over those seven generations is lost.

UNESCO and the Formal Protection of Transmission

The UNESCO inscription of falconry as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — first listed in 2010 and expanded in 2021 to 24 States Parties including Mongolia and Kazakhstan — exists specifically because the apprenticeship pipeline is the part of the tradition most at risk.

The listing’s framing makes this explicit. Falconry is described not as a static cultural artefact but as “the traditional art and practice of training and flying falcons (and sometimes eagles, hawks, buzzards and other birds of prey)” with practices including “methods of breeding, training and caring for birds, the equipment used and the bonds between the falconer and the bird.” Crucially, the inscription emphasises that this body of practice is transmitted through mentoring within families. The intervention UNESCO offers is recognition that this transmission is heritage worth protecting at the national and international level.

For an apprentice burkitchi today, that recognition can mean small but real benefits: legitimacy with state institutions, protection of festival traditions like the Sagsai eagle festival and the Ulgii Golden Eagle Festival, and a framework that argues the practice is worth investing the years it takes to learn.

For travellers visiting Bayan-Ölgii on an Eagle Hunters Adventure or attending the Altai Eagle Festival or Golden Eagle Festival, the visible part of the tradition is the eagle. The hidden part — the family apprenticeship that produced the hunter standing in front of you — is what keeps the practice alive into the next generation.

Suggested Tours:

• Eagle Hunters Adventure
• Altai Eagle Festival
• Golden Eagle Festival

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