Why did young Anna Knittel abseil down to the eagle’s nest twice?

Market production – i.e., the sale of food – was really only possible for large farms. Additionally, the weather deteriorated significantly at that time, with cold spells beginning to set in. Potato blight devastated crops for several years in a row, resulting in widespread famines. The most famous was in Ireland, which forced hundreds of thousands of Irish people to emigrate. In Tyrol, the “Schwabenkinder” (Swabian children) were a reflection of this incredible emergency. (To save food, children were sent to Swabia to work in sometimes undignified conditions. But the family had one less mouth to feed, and the children usually earned a little money.)

The firm glacier maxima around 1820 and in the 1850s show that particularly wet and cool climatic conditions prevailed, which also affected agricultural land. The accumulation of crop failures led to the last great famine of the Vormärz period from 1846/47 onwards, which also severely affected Tyrol. Many families were no longer able to provide themselves with basic foodstuffs, and disease and malnutrition spread.

"On the pass, we met three Duxer (Tuxer), a man and two women, who were carrying butter to Steinach in their Krachsen (Kraxen). There is a large trade in butter from the Duxertal valley, and the inhabitants of both sexes carry more than three hundredweight over the passes to Innsbruck or to the towns on the Brenner road." (3 Summers in Tyrol, pp. 177, 178)

Not only did the three have to cover around 33 km to reach Steinach, but they also had to climb 1,000 metres in altitude. It was more than 50 km to Innsbruck. All this with probably 10-20 kg of butter on their backs.

As Anton Falger, the “father of the Lechtal”, later explained in his description of the valley, there were already over 300 Lechtal traders abroad in 1799. Just imagine that! They traded throughout Europe, not only in cloth, bedding, bed feathers, jewelry, and haberdashery, but also in yarns, horses, violins, incense, linseed, brass, and ironware. In fact, they traded in anything that promised to turn a profit.

All attempts by “Loise”, as Anna's father was known in the village, to shoot the eagles using a rear sight and front sight had failed. So the young lads of the town had to show their mettle and abseil one of their own down to the eagle's nest. The operation almost ended in disaster: the rope got caught in a crevice, and the lad dangled for hours over the yawning abyss. Since he could no longer be pulled up, the rope was tied down, and messengers were sent to the valley to fetch the bell ropes from Elbingenalp. This allowed him to be rescued, but the lads' courage was gone. Not a single lad could be found who was willing to volunteer as an eagle hunter and make a new attempt to remove the nest.

Then, 17-year-old Anna, known as “Nanno,” said she was “the man for the job.” The next day, she abseiled down and took the young bird from the nest, which her father had, as always, placed in a shed in the attic to be fed up, so that it could later be sold to a menagerie or falconer. The birds became so tame that he only had to call ‘Mandl, come here’ and they would sit on his arm.

When Anna's father observed eagles building a nest again in 1863, as he had done five years earlier, he tried for 18 hours (!) to shoot the eagle. However, he failed several times. So he raised the alarm in the village.

The young lads, who should have been capable of such a feat, were, however, “cured” of abseiling into the eagle's nest on the Sachserwand. No one could be found who was willing to abseil down. So Anna set off for the wall with a master marksman, her brother Honnus, and a few other men. It was precisely this adventure that was to make Anna world famous.

She recounted her second eagle adventure at the request of the Bavarian writer Ludwig Steub, who published the text under the title ‘Die Lechthalerin’ or ‘Das Annele im Adlerhorst’ in the Leipziger Illustrierte and in the Tiroler Miscellen.