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📊 Depredation Forecast
What drives a hard year — and how to see it coming.
Golden eagles are mammal hunters first. Most lamb predation is "prey-switching" — eagles turn to livestock when their wild prey runs short. These are the ten cycles and conditions that decide whether a lambing season is mild or brutal.
Eagle depredation on sheep is rarely random. It tracks the land.
Across most of the western range, golden eagles would far rather hunt jackrabbits, cottontails, ground squirrels, and prairie dogs than chase livestock. When that wild prey is abundant, lambs are mostly left alone. When it crashes, eagles switch to the next available food — and on open lambing range, that can mean lambs.
That single mechanism — prey-switching — sits behind almost every driver below. Each one works by either shrinking the wild prey base or raising how much pressure eagles put on the landscape.
Wild prey abundant
Eagles hunt rabbits & rodents
The natural larder is full. Lamb losses stay low — often even where eagle numbers are high. The same flock, the same range, a quiet season.
Wild prey crashes
Eagles switch to alternative prey
The larder empties. Eagles look for the next available food, and exposed lambs become targets. Losses climb — sometimes sharply.
That swing between the two states — driven by the factors below — is the forecast.
🐰 The Wild Larder — Prey-Base Drivers
What the eagles would rather be eating
01Black-tailed jackrabbit cycle
Jackrabbits are the staple prey across much of the western range, and their numbers swing through multi-year boom-and-bust cycles. Lamb losses tend to spike in the crash years, when the eagles' main food source thins out. This is the single biggest lever.
🔎 Watch: local jackrabbit sightings trending down versus the last two or three years.
02Cottontails & other rabbits and hares
Cottontails and other lagomorphs are the secondary prey layer that can buffer a jackrabbit downturn. When they are low at the same time, there is nothing left to absorb the crash.
🔎 Watch: rabbit numbers low across several species at once.
03Ground squirrels & prairie dogs
These are major spring prey, available right as they emerge from hibernation. Ground-squirrel lows and prairie-dog colony die-offs — often from sylvatic plague — pull a key food source out exactly at lambing time.
🔎 Watch: quiet prairie-dog towns; a late or sparse ground-squirrel emergence.
04Rabbit disease — RHDV2
Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus 2 has spread through wild rabbit and jackrabbit populations across the Southwest since about 2020. It can crash the prey base across whole regions, and fast — a newer factor still unfolding.
🔎 Watch: confirmed RHDV2 detections in your state or county.
🌦️ Weather & Climate Drivers
The conditions that set the prey base
05Drought
Drought is the dominant weather driver. Less moisture means less vegetation, which means fewer and less-productive rabbits and rodents — so the wild prey base falls. Multi-year droughts compound the effect season after season.
🔎 Watch: drought-monitor status for your county heading into spring.
06Winter severity
Hard winters and deep snow reduce prey survival into spring and can concentrate eagles on whatever range stays open. A brutal winter before lambing means a depleted larder right when lambs arrive.
🔎 Watch: a severe or prolonged winter in the months before lambing.
07Spring green-up timing
Rabbit and rodent breeding keys off spring vegetation. A late or weak green-up delays that breeding, so wild prey is scarcest at the exact moment newborn lambs are most available and most vulnerable.
🔎 Watch: a cold, dry, or late spring that pushes green-up back.
🦅 Eagle-Side Drivers
How much pressure the eagles bring
08Eagle density & subadult influx
More eagles on the landscape means more pressure. Young, less-skilled subadult eagles take easy prey like lambs more readily than experienced adults — and wintering or migrating eagles concentrate in some regions right around lambing season.
🔎 Watch: unusual numbers of eagles — especially mottled younger birds — near lambing grounds.
09Eagle breeding productivity
In good prey years eagles fledge more young, and a nest full of eaglets sharply raises a pair's food demand. A strong fledge class also means more inexperienced subadults roaming the landscape the following year.
🔎 Watch: a strong eagle nesting year — added pressure often follows the next season.
🗺️ Landscape & Exposure
Where the flock meets the risk
10Lambing exposure & landscape
Open sagebrush and grassland lambing grounds near eagle nesting cliffs, ridges, and hunting perches — with little cover for lambs — drive the most losses. Shed or night-pen lambing versus open-range lambing changes a flock's exposure dramatically.
🔎 Watch: open-range lambing close to eagle nesting terrain.
A few more factors fine-tune the picture. Abundant carrion — winter-kill and gut piles — pulls hunting pressure off live lambs. Flock size and herder presence matter. And longer-term loss of rabbit habitat to wildfire or sagebrush conversion quietly erodes the prey base from underneath.
📅 Putting It Together
Reading the forecast
No single factor tells the whole story — but they stack. The classic recipe for a hard lambing season is a down prey base and a drought, especially following a severe winter. When the signs line up that way, treat it as an elevated-risk year and front-load your defenses:
Shed or night-pen lambing through the first few weeks, when lambs are most vulnerable.
Tighten herder and guardian-animal presence on open ground.
Watch the heat map for how risk shifts month to month.
Document early and thoroughly if losses begin — it protects your compensation claim.
In a strong prey year, the same flock on the same range may see almost nothing. That swing — from a quiet season to a brutal one — is exactly what these factors forecast.
This page explains the mechanisms behind a hard year; the drivers are well-established in golden eagle ecology. A live, year-by-year outlook would layer in current jackrabbit, drought, and winter data for your specific area.
Stay ahead of the season
The forecast is only useful if it reaches the ranch gate. Here is where to go deeper:
Eagle Exchange Hub builds tools that help western producers — and the public — understand golden eagle conflict clearly: grounded in science, fair to every side, and honest about what the data does and doesn't show.
Independent educational resource — not affiliated with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, any government agency, or activist organization. Educational use only; not legal or professional advice.