Eagle Dreams

From a young age Stephen Bodio longed to visit the birthplace of falconry and observe the traditions that had survived intact through the ages. His fantasy was realized when he spent months in the westernmost region of Mongolia with the people and birds of his dreams.

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When Stephen Bodio was a young boy in the early 1950s he saw an image in "National Geographic" which became forever etched in his mind: it was a photograph of a Kazakh nomad, dressed in a long coat and wearing a fur hat, holding a huge tame eagle on his fist. And a life-long fascination with Central Asia was born. Mongolia, a vast country located between Siberia and China and little known to outsiders, was long under Soviet domination and inaccessible to Westerners. When it became independent in 1990 Bodio began planning a pilgrimage to see if the eagle hunters of "The Picture" had survived. A falconer himself, he longed to visit the birthplace of falconry and observe the traditions that had survived intact through the ages. His fantasy was realized when he spent months in the westernmost region of Mongolia with the people and birds of his dreams. In "Eagle Dreams", Bodio gives life to the people, landscapes and animals of Mongolia that have become part of his soul.