60 Minutes - Sunday, July 21, 2019

Episode Date: July 22, 2019

Storm Water management, innovated by the Dutch, could help lessen the damage from hurricanes. Bill Whitaker reports. Steve Kroft shares the story of a former bank robber who became a law professor. Plus -- Scott Pelley learns the art of Falconry. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes."  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. More than a hundred lives were lost to hurricanes last year, and billions will be spent to try to repair the damage. It's a new normal in the era of superstorms. But this Dutchman from a city below sea level says there's a solution for America. Invest and innovate, or pay later. There's a national flood insurance program that is going bankrupt.

You pay disaster bills every year. pay later. There's a national flood insurance program that is going bankrupt and you pay disaster bills every year. In the rebuilding, it's costing a lot of money. It's wasted. You're a professor at one of the finest law schools in the country. Is that something that you thought you would be able to do? No. It makes me laugh hearing you say it out loud because there are days where it doesn't make sense to me and I've lived it. Here's why. Professor Sean Hopwood is a convicted felon who spent 11 years in federal prison and as a foolish, reckless 21-year-old in Nebraska, listened to a friend with a really bad idea. He said, what do you think about robbing a bank?

And most people would have laughed that off or said, maybe we need another beer. Or anything other than, that sounds like a great idea, which is what I ended up saying. In Mongolia, hunters partner with eagles in a tradition that goes back thousands of years. One of the best at this is Lauren McGow from, of all places, Oklahoma City. This is the most ancient form of falconry in the world. It blows my mind that it's even real. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings, but you can do it. We built a camera harness to learn what it's even real. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings, but you can do it. We built a camera harness to learn what it's like to fly like an eagle.

I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's your next adventure? Everyone deserves a chance to do what they love. Pacific Life helps you reach financial goals while you go after your personal ones. Plans change over time and your financial solutions can too. Pacific Life has a variety of financial solutions that can help you complement your life goals and passions while managing the uncertainties. Thank you. insurers in the industry and has been named one of the 2019 world's most ethical companies by the Ethisphere Institute. The freedom to go after whatever is next for you, that's the power of Pacific. Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help

give you the freedom to do what you love or visit www.pacificLife.com Recent hurricane seasons have been vicious. Last year's killed more than 100 people and inflicted more than $50 billion in damages. The country is still deep in recovery, and this year's storm season is already underway. The relentless cycle of disaster, rebuild, repeat has many coastal residents feeling numb and helpless, and climate scientists say we can expect more frequent, more powerful storms in the future. As we first reported last fall, the Netherlands, one of the most flood-prone places in the world, almost never floods. Holland is about twice the size of New Jersey and is one of the world's most densely populated countries. Much of it is below sea level, yet the Dutch don't

bother with flood insurance. They don't need it. With hurricane season here again, we wondered, do the Dutch have a solution? It was a disaster that unfolded in slow motion. For four days last September, Hurricane Florence crawled up the East Coast, dumping record rainfall, more than 35 inches in North Carolina, flooding thousands of homes and taking dozens of lives. The destruction from Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey and Maria cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Florence is another chapter in a story we know all too well.

Every measure is a protective measure. We met a Dutchman, Henk Ovinck, who says it's time to rewrite America's disaster playbook entirely. And there's only one opportunity. That is when a disaster hits. It's like an x-ray. It tells you where all your vulnerabilities are and gives you the opportunity to step up and say, we can do better.

Ovinck is the world's only water ambassador, a role given to him by the Dutch government. We need to take action now. He advises the UN, 35 individual countries, and a dozen U.S. cities. He travels the globe like a missionary, preaching the gospel of flood prevention. This is your house. This is my house.

One of his latest stops was Houston, still recovering from Hurricane Harvey. So what's the biggest challenge in the United States? You're solution-oriented. You have a collective. When things happen, you come together. You want to build back and repair and be ready when disastrous things happen. But there's not so much a belief that you can actually prevent a disaster from happening. But how do you go about preventing a disaster like Katrina, Harvey, Sandy? It just doesn't seem possible. We can't prevent them from

happening. But the impact that is caused by the disasters, we can decrease by preparing ourselves. I think the catastrophes we see in the world are all man-made. The storms are perhaps man-caused, and you can debate that, but the catastrophes because of the storms, those are man-made. It's a radical statement. We went with him to the Netherlands to learn what shaped his thinking. It's water. Water is everywhere in this country known for its charming canals, picturesque dikes and windmills. But they're not just quaint tourist attractions.

For centuries, the canals and dikes have held back water. The windmills pump it away. Oving took us up in a helicopter so we could see it from above. We flew over Rotterdam, his hometown, so he could show us how the country has been engineered. How much of this city is below sea level? Almost everything. When was the last time this flooded? This doesn't flood. Because of the precautions you have taken. The Dutch allocate more than a billion dollars a year to manage their flood infrastructure. Some of it is massive, like the Maaslandkering storm surge barrier. These are the gates.

Right. They're big. They're enormous. It's like an Eiffel Tower, like the Paris Eiffel Tower on its sides, but then two. Each one the size of the Eiffel Tower. The gates guard one of the largest ports in the world and most of the Dutch population. They don't have hurricanes like we do, but ferocious storms with hurricane-force winds can blow in from the North Sea and push in huge storm surges. When that happens, the two arms seal off the Rhine River and Rotterdam. The gates took six years to build and cost $500 million.

That's a big investment for something that you've only had to use once or twice since it was built. $150 billion were lost in New Orleans. I don't think I need to say more. How many people were killed? Sandy, another storm, $70 billion. We don't have those damages. But they did in the past. Your Katrina moment was in... 53.

1953. Yeah, but 53 was our real wake-up call. A storm blowing in from over the North Sea, from the West. What happened? It actually swallowed the southwestern part of the Netherlands. The dams, dikes and levees broke and the water flowed in, taking away lives of almost 2,000 people. A lot of families were ripped apart. The Dutch still refer to it as the disaster because they haven't had one since,

not a single death from flooding in 66 years. They have learned the lessons of the past well. Dutch engineers calculate how high and strong dikes and dams must be to withstand the most extreme weather, a one in 10,000 storm. Rotterdam is at the forefront of defensive design. This basketball court can hold 450,000 gallons of storm runoff. This sloping park atop a shopping center is a storm surge barrier. And this world-class rowing facility doubles as a flood reservoir. The Dutch pride themselves on blending form and function. So what is this place? These look like dunes. They are dunes. But I take it this is the Netherlands, so it's not just dunes. No. These

are man-made dunes? Hank Oving took us to one of his favorite projects along the North Sea. The beach town of Kotwick was vulnerable until Dutch engineers created these natural looking dunes. Many beaches in the U.S. have man-made dunes, but they are nothing like this. And these dunes protect the town from a sea surge or a big storm. Sea surge, storm, and also we incorporate sea level rise of the future. They also integrated urban planning to unclog Kotwik's streets when tourists flocked to the beach and to raise the height of the dunes to 25 feet above sea level, engineers built a parking garage. Under the dunes. Under the dunes. So under this whole stretch, it looks like, I don't know,

several football fields. Yes. Under all of this is a parking garage. Almost 700 cars can park here. Could a structure like this have saved New Jersey beach communities from sandy? Yes, it could. You might call the Netherlands the storm drain of Europe. Several major rivers empty here. When France and Germany flooded like this three years ago, most of that water ended up in the Netherlands. But towns and cities in Holland weren't inundated, largely because of something the Dutch are doing that defies logic. They are lowering dikes and dams along some rivers. Rivers are living elements in a landscape, and they become bigger when there's more water and become smaller when there's less.

And they need to have that capacity. So you went from flood control to controlled flooding. Yeah. You have to let some places flood so you can keep other places dry? Yeah. The Dutch call it room for the river. So this is where your old house was?

Yeah. Vic Gremer, a social worker in the village of Workendam, personally had to make room for the Meravade River. Hundreds of people like him had to move so their property could be used as floodplains. So the government comes and asks you to leave. Did you have a choice? Not really.

We had a choice to leave or stay, but on their conditions. The conditions? He could remain in the area, but had to sell the family home to the government. He used the money to build a new house on higher ground. What did you think of that when they tore your house down? But the old house, there are 25 years of memories. It's really the end of, I'll get emotional. But he said he did it for the greater good. Allowing the swollen river to pool in this new floodplain could save thousands of people

from flooding downstream in Rotterdam. The idea of moving people out of the floodplains in the U.S., we'd be talking about millions of people. That would be a really tough sell. You pay for people to be in the most vulnerable places of your country. There's a national flood insurance program that is going bankrupt. You pay disaster bills every year. In the rebuilding, it's costing a lot of money. It's wasted. That waste seems built into our disaster DNA.

In the U.S., FEMA deals with natural disasters. Its primary mission is not to prevent, but to respond. FEMA helps disaster victims build back, usually the same structure in the same place. People's apartments were flooded, people's businesses, our critical infrastructure, all of our substations, so we had no power. Dawn Zimmer was mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey, when Hurricane Sandy hit almost seven years ago. She told us the city of 55,000 people right across the Hudson River from Manhattan was almost entirely underwater. In some neighborhoods, 10 feet of water? 10 feet of water, yes. And it was fish in people's apartments. It was waste. It was oil.

It was a toxic mix in our city. She said Hoboken got money from FEMA to put things back pretty much the way they were. But she wanted to rebuild smarter. It doesn't help for me to have a fire station. It's individually protected, but there's water all around it. That fire station won't be able to help anyone in the middle of a storm. It just doesn't make sense. So why can't you just get the money and use it as you see best?

That's just not the way it works. She says that's when Hank Ovink entered the picture. Sean Donovan, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, tapped Ovink for President Obama's Hurricane Sandy task force. The two came up with an idea for an international design competition to fix what Sandy had destroyed, following the Dutch philosophy, rebuild differently for the future. Ovinck helped convince the federal government

to cough up almost a billion dollars for it. You know, in the U.S. that sounds kind of crazy. Yeah. A billion dollars for a competition to rebuild. Something like that had never been done before. Never been done in this capacity, so they also had to believe my blue eyes and my story and saying, okay, we believe this young man coming from the Netherlands. Let's work with him.

A proposal that will protect Hoboken and its neighbors was awarded $230 million of the competition money. A Dutch design team came up with the winning plans, with a Dutch twist. A storm surge defense disguised as a park with a boathouse. Benches and outdoor seating as barriers to keep the Hudson from drowning the city again. Coming up with the plan was the easy part. Convincing residents to go along was much harder. There were people that were calling out, like,

give back the money. So let me get this clear, that even after the devastation of Sandy, people were not convinced that they needed flood protection? People were really concerned, for example, about their property values. What would the property values of Hobo be if we're flooded on a regular basis and our entire city is destroyed? After consulting with the community, the plans were amended, and most residents got on board.

Hoboken plans to break ground next year. It could be the first test for OVINK's vision in the U.S. It's a choice in the end. It's a human choice. We can think about that future as an opportunity, or close our eyes and do nothing and let it happen to us and see more death and despair, more assets and people lost. Jailhouse lawyers are prisoners who manage to learn enough about the law while incarcerated to help themselves and other inmates with their legal problems.

We get letters from them every week. Tonight, we're going to reintroduce you to Sean Hopwood, who is arguably the most successful jailhouse lawyer ever, having had one of his cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court while serving a 12-year sentence for armed bank robbery. Since his release, he's built up an extraordinary resume as a legal scholar and as an advisor to the White House on criminal justice reforms. We first met him two years ago at one of the nation's premier law schools, where he'd just become its newest professor. A tale of redemption as improbable as any you're likely to hear. Question one is, was there a constitutional violation?

In his first semester at Georgetown University, Professor Hopwood is teaching criminal law. Were the first statements unlawfully obtained? Yes. The irony isn't lost on him or his students, who know that he's a convicted felon and that less than a decade ago was an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pekin, Illinois. You're a professor at one of the finest law schools in the country.

Is that something that you thought you would be able to do? No. It makes me laugh hearing you say it out loud, because there are days where it doesn't make sense to me, and I've lived it. So I can see why it doesn't make sense to hardly anyone else. It's easier for me to imagine you as a Georgetown law professor than it is for me to imagine you as a bank robber. Well, that's because the bank robber has long been dead and gone. Hopwood was born here 44 years ago in the small farming community of David City, Nebraska,

surrounded by cornfields and cattle. He was a bright, cocky, stubborn kid from a solid family, and he hated rules. A good athlete and a miserable student who won a basketball scholarship to Midland University and partied his way out of it in one semester. He drank himself through a two-year hitch in the Navy, then added drugs to the mix when he returned to David City, working in a feedlot. How much has David City changed? He was broke, unrepentant, and frustrated that things weren't going his way. So this is where it started. One night he got a call from a friend

asking him to come down to the local bar for a drink and listen to what turned out to be a very bad idea. He said, what do you think about robbing a bank? And most people would have laughed that off or said, maybe we need another beer or anything other than that sounds like a great idea, which is what I ended up saying. Really? You know, I don't think either one of us thought that night that we were going to actually do it. or anything other than, that sounds like a great idea, which is what I ended up saying.

Really? You know, I don't think either one of us thought that night that we were going to actually do it. It wasn't until months later when they started scouting locations that Sean realized they might actually do it. So this is one of your banks? It is. This is the third bank. The idea was to stick up very small banks in tiny towns like Gresham, where there was no police presence and little risk of armed confrontation. We wanted to get in and out of the bank as quickly as possible,

not hurt anyone, grab as much money as we could, and run. And that's basically what we did in all five bank robberies. Were you any good at it? No. I did 11 years in federal prison for stealing $150,000. I don't think that's good. Eventually, the FBI put out a composite sketch and began closing in.

In July 1998, he was apprehended in this Omaha hotel 10 months after his first robbery. When they arrested me, they searched my car and found $100,000 in cash that was directly traceable to the bank I had just robbed and multiple guns and a scanner and binoculars. They had you. They had me. And they would have him for a long time.

When he entered the federal penitentiary in Illinois in May of 1999, he was 23 years old. Was it dangerous? Of course, in part because there's not a lot for the inmates to do. He doesn't talk about the things that he witnessed and experienced in federal prison. He doesn't want his family to know, and he sees no value in reliving them, except for the job he landed in the safety of the legal library, which every federal prison is required to have. And for the first six months I worked at the prison law library, I didn't hardly touch the books. They were big, they were thick, they were intimidating. What was the spark that got you to start opening

the books and looking at them? Self-motivation. It all started with a Supreme Court ruling that Sean thought might help him get his sentence reduced, and it ended with him assisting other prisoners with all sorts of cases. I spent two months working on my own case, researching, and I was never able to get any legal relief for myself the entire time I was in federal prison. But you were for other inmates. I did. Lawyers had made really bad mistakes, and it really cost their clients sometimes, you know, a decade or two in federal prison. Inside the walls at Pekin, he won the respect of fellow inmates and discovered that he had an aptitude for something, the law. I would be sitting in my

cell reading a federal reporter, which is a compendium of federal court of appeals cases, and I would just read that cover to cover as if it was a novel, just for fun. Was it fun? I think the law is fascinating. In what way? It was like a big puzzle for me. Three years into his prison term, he got an opportunity to show just how much he'd learned when John Fellers, a friend and fellow inmate, asked Sean to appeal his drug conviction to the highest court in the land.

He came to me and said, would you take the case and would you file this petition to the Supreme Court? I said no, absolutely not. Why? His case was very complex and I didn't think I could do it, but John was very persistent. He would spend months working day and night on the petition. It required him to master the facts of the case, understand the statutes and legal precedents, identify the errors made by lawyers and judges in the appeal process, and then craft an argument in the language of the court before mailing it off to Washington. Did the Supreme Court know that the brief had been written by a prisoner?

The first hint would have been the fact that it was typed on a typewriter. I don't think law firms in 2003 were using typewriters to knock out Supreme Court briefs. Four out of nine Supreme Court justices must agree for a case to be heard. That year, more than 8,000 petitions were filed. Seventy-four were accepted. One of those was written by Sean Hopwood. And one morning, a friend of mine came running and screaming my name. Sean, Sean, Sean. And what he had was a copy of the USA Today.

And I read the article and it said that the court had granted John Feller's case. What went through your mind? I was shocked. I was shocked that the court had granted the case and that I had done something that, you know, lawyers wait their whole lives to do and done it the first time. It's not that unusual for prisoners to file their own petitions. What is freakishly unusual is for one of those petitions to be granted. Seth Waxman, a prominent appellate lawyer and the former Solicitor General of the United States, is not easily impressed. But when he was asked to argue the Feller's case before the Supreme Court, he said he would do it only if Sean Hopwood would work from prison as part of the team.

I wanted him to be involved because I was really curious. It seemed actually almost inconceivable that somebody with his level of education and his level of exposure to the life of the law could actually write a much better than average cert petition. So this would have been good for a Washington lawyer. Even for a licensed appointed lawyer representing a federal prisoner, you would say, wow. Waxman won the Feller's case before the Supreme Court in the unanimous decision and became Sean's mentor during his final six years in prison. When a former Solicitor General of the United States says that you did a good job writing a brief, that has an impact, especially when you're surrounded in this environment where

prison guards are telling you every day that you're worthless and you don't amount to anything. Did you win some more cases? I did. I won another case in the Supreme Court. I won a case in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. And I won cases mostly on resentencing motions for federal prisoners and federal district court cases kind of all over the country. He found a purpose in life.

And when Ann Marie Metzner, who had once had a high school crush on Sean, began writing letters and paying him visits, he started to think he might have some kind of future when he got out. But he knew there were huge obstacles ahead. Did you decide you wanted to be a lawyer while you were in prison? I did, but I didn't think I could. I had had countless number of lawyers tell me I could not go to law school. And even if I could, I would never get licensed by any of the state bar associations, given my crimes. When he was released to a halfway house near Omaha in 2008,

he had never seen an iPhone, never been on the Internet, and was computer illiterate. But as if by miracle, he saw an ad for a document analyst at Kako Legal Printing, one of just a few companies in the U.S. that helps attorneys assemble briefs for the Supreme Court. Andy Cockle and his sister Trish Bilotti remembered that Sean showed up for his interview in ill-fitting clothes with a rumpled letter from Seth Waxman and an 11-year gap in his resume. We work with attorneys every day,

all week long, that are trying to get their case granted, and none of them do. And this guy comes out and says, I had two of them granted. And so that, yeah. Did you believe him? No. I thought he was delusional. But his story checked out, and they gave him the job. You're glad you hired him. Oh, yeah. It was sad to see him go. He spent three years with the Cockles in Omaha, completing the undergraduate degree he'd begun in prison and continuing to impress the lawyers he worked with. With their help, and against all odds, the University of Washington Law School took a chance on him. He won a full scholarship from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and upon graduation was admitted to the bar. How did you do in law school? Surprisingly well. You were already a lawyer. Well, I mean, it was a new experience doing well

in school. He did well enough to land a prestigious clerkship with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the second most important court in the country. The idea that a convicted bank robber was going to go work for Janice Rogers Brown, a very conservative judge on a very important court, surprising in the absolute sense, yes. In the context of who Sean Hopwood is and what he was setting out to do, not that surprising. A year later, it led to a highly competitive teaching fellowship

at Georgetown Law's Appellate Litigation Clinic, where he did so well, the faculty awarded him a position as a professor of law. How hard is it to get a job teaching law at Georgetown? It's very hard. Professor Stephen Goldblatt is the faculty director for the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law. To have somebody who's a credible voice, who actually lived the experience,

who understands what it's like to spend a day in prison, much less 11 years, is highly unusual. So I think this was a unique opportunity to get somebody for whom there are no others out there and that the potential was enormous. Along with his other accomplishments, Sean Hopwood also got to marry that girlfriend, David City, Annie Metzner, who is now a law student herself. They have two children. Are you surprised how this has turned out?

Yeah, yeah. I had no idea of what the future would hold for us. Neither one of us had any clue that all these wonderful things would happen. You'll motivate us. Thank you. Hopwood's main interest now is criminal justice reform. He's an advocate for shorter prison sentences for most crimes and more vocational training, drug treatment, and mental health counseling, which are often nonexistent.

Prison is not the place for personal growth. We warehouse people and then we kick them out into the real world with very little support and hope that a miracle happens. But somehow all the things stacked against you, you were able to do it. Yeah. It was people that helped, that went out of their way to provide grace to me that made the difference. Falconry, the art of hunting with birds of prey, was born in the forbidding Altai Mountains of Central Asia. As we first told you last year, hunters there still loft golden eagles into the sky in a partnership of man and bird that predates recorded history. We say man, but in truth, one of the best hunters in Mongolia today is a woman from Oklahoma City. Lauren McGow took us to one of the most remote places on Earth

to meet the hunters who trained her. And before the next few minutes are through, you will know what it's like to fly like an eagle. The Mongolian steppe is the greatest expanse of grassland unaltered by humankind. It endures because human existence has narrow odds between the widest climate extremes on Earth, 104 degrees in summer, 50 below in winter. Nomads depend on the animals that yield nearly all of their food, fiber, clothing, and fuel. And one of the oldest bonds in nature is an alliance of survival among hunters, horses,

and golden eagles. This is the most ancient form of falconry in the world. This is where it all began. It's the cradle. So several thousand years ago, we don't know precisely when a man saw an eagle catch a rabbit or a fox and had the ingenious idea to hunt in partnership with it. It blows my mind that it's even real. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings, but you can do it. Lauren McGow was in high school when she dedicated her life to raptors. She traveled with us to the place she calls the Cradle.

6,000 miles led us first to the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. This civilization conquered the known world in the 13th century. The Mongols ranged from Asia to Europe, the largest contiguous empire of all time. From here, we flew another 800 miles to Bayan Olgi, where Mongolia, Russia, China, and Kazakhstan meet. This was the end of the road, but not the end of our journey. We crossed the open steppe, passed wild Bactrian camels with two humps, a vanishing species with only about 1,000 left in the world.

Our destination was a camp of nomads, people who introduced Lauren McGow to the Golden Eagle. Hello! They hadn't seen her in two years. Deja! Feels like I never left. Just in a few minutes of seeing everybody. Such a magical place. Now, how did a woman from Oklahoma end up

out here in Mongolia? Well, I read a book on falconry and it's like the fire was lit. I just knew I had to do it. And as I was researching, I went to the library and I found this old book that had black and white photos of eagle hunters from Mongolia. So, you know, this beautiful shaggy horse and this man with a giant eagle and a fox pelt on his horse. And it just looked like the most incredible thing. And I thought, I have to see it. I have to do it. At the age of 17, her father, a former Air Force stealth pilot, brought her to Mongolia. Lauren returned five years later with funding from a Fulbright scholarship. Then she earned a PhD based on

her work with the eagle hunters. These are the people that can talk to animals because they have relationships with goats, sheep, horses, camels, eagles. They have intimate knowledge of where snow leopards are and foxes are. There's no agriculture here because the land's not arable. So they've ingeniously learned to domesticate animals and then build these unique relationships with wild animals. It's a relationship that she learned from people who endure the life of 19th century ranchers. They are Kazakhs who make up just 4% of Mongolians. They have no running water, no electricity.

They survive on meat and milk and burn dung as fuel. The nomads live in clusters of a half-dozen families or so. The boys mine the flocks while the men ride in search of foxes to make furs for sub-zero survival. In all the years you've been doing this, what have you learned about these animals? A hunter named Chukan gave us an answer we never saw coming. As they said in the old times,

if the horse makes your name famous in a race once a year, the eagle makes your name famous a hundred times a year. If I gift to people many foxes, they will say it was Chukan who gifted us the foxes. Eagle hunting is more about your name being spread far and wide among the people. So if eagle hunting is about the ego of men, we wondered how they saw Lauren McGow. She had her mind set on learning to hunt with the eagle.

Her motivation came from deep in her heart. We just couldn't say no. When Lauren first came to Mongolia, it took her two weeks to catch an eagle she could call her own. How do you catch a golden eagle? Yes, so you have a dead hare that you lay out with a crow or a raven staked nearby, and you encircle it in a net. So the eagle, on migration, looks down and sees this hare that only a crow has possession of, and it thinks, ah, I can easily bully that crow out of that rabbit and have a free meal to myself. So it comes in, and when it tries to grab the dead rabbit, the net unfolds around the eagle. The eagle is taught to feed at the hand of the hunter. And as long as the meals are regular, the eagles are calm, content, and come back for

more. They perch on the hunter's arm with a rawhide leash called a jess tied to their legs. They train the birds with a fox pelt tugged by a rope. This is what happens when the eagle zeroes in on a fox. After the bird makes the kill, the hunters ride in, strip the pelt,

and give the meat to the eagle. It's a technique well over a thousand years old. The hunters ride in, strip the pelt, and give the meat to the eagle. It's a technique well over a thousand years old. We may not know exactly when it started, but you don't have to be here in Mongolia very long to figure out why it began. In an area as vast as this, with game so rare, it helps to have a hunting partner that can see seven times better than a human and cover all of this at about 50 miles an hour. What is that like? The eagles were kind enough to show us. We custom built a soft rubber camera harness

and learned how to fly. Golden eagles are abundant all around the northern hemisphere. In terms of survival as a species, conservationists call golden eagles an animal of least concern. This is a 10-pound bird, which don't be fooled if that doesn't sound like a lot. They have hollow bones and they're mostly feathers, so 10 pounds on a bird is an enormous bird. They have a six-foot wingspan.

They usually have lovely amber eyes. And the name golden eagle derives from the beautiful golden feathers on their nape. Around the neck. Yes, around the neck. They're incredibly effective at killing, which is what they're built for. I mean, they're a modern-day velociraptor, a perfect product of evolution. I will never be tired of a golden eagle flying. Every time it thrills me.

The eagle's talons can close on its prey with a bone-crushing force of 900 pounds per square inch. A fun fact that is no fun to know. Come on, sweetheart. Perfect. Okay. Very good. And then go ahead and stand up. And then to secure the eagle, place your jesses between your thumb and the rest of your fingers. Right here. Yes. Okay. The noise that the eagle recognizes is ca. Okay. Ca. All right. Whenever you're ready, just take off her hood.

Remove the hood? Yes. Ca. Oh. Ca. Ca. Oh. Good girl.

Oh, God. What a feeling. Notice she said, good girl. The only eagles worthy of partnership are female. They're larger, stronger, better hunters. Ironic, since the human partner is traditionally male. Of all the eagle hunters you've known, how does Lauren rate? How good is she?

She is at the same level as men. She could compete with them. Lauren, at 31, is considered one of the best falconers in the world. She has brought the ancient ways to Oklahoma, where she rehabilitates raptors and trained with her own eagle named Miles. What is the career of one of these eagles? So an eagle is trapped first year, second year, maybe third year on its migration. And then it has a time with an eagle hunter, which could be as short as a year or as long as six, seven, eight years. Eventually,

they return that eagle back to the wild. It is part of the tradition to let them go? Yes. They firmly believe that an older eagle should be in the wild. What do you say to some people who might watch this and think that the eagles are being abused, that they shouldn't be caught? I would encourage anybody that has doubts to go out with a falconer. In this country or in the United States or anywhere, we only encourage their natural instincts. The only difference is you are right there. You have a

front row seat to see this incredibly million-year-old predator-prey relationship. Do you worry that one day there will be no more eagle hunters? A hunter named Uni told us, no, it's an essential art that Kazakhs are born with. Since Kazakhs have come to the earth, they have been practicing this tradition. It will not disappear. Also, each of us has a young person that we teach, like this boy.

It passes from generation to generation. What's at stake if this tradition is lost? This is where man first figured out that he could have a relationship with a raptor. And what a loss would it be for humanity if it was gone? We can take an individual eagle and bring it from the spectrum of wild all the way to tame and then wild again. And we get to see what they're capable of up close and in person. Man, if that understanding of eagles and animals were to leave, that's not a world I want to live in. The boy named, is the hope of his family's traditional world.

He's learning horsemanship and falconry. And it was with Becca that we discovered the most endangered species on the steppe, the nomads themselves. There may be only 300 eagle hunters left, a rare breed of human still speaking the language of the wild. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.