Estimating speciesabundance is of key importance in population and ecosystem level research, butoften hard to obtain. Increasingly, study designs using camera-traps combinedwith statistical analyses using mark-recapture and occupancy methods are usedfor large-scale monitoring of the abundance of species that are elusive and/oroccur naturally at low densities. The golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos)is widespread in the northern hemisphere but occurs at low breeding densitiesand has an elusive behaviour for most of the year. Traditionally, monitoring ofgolden eagle abundance is based on labour intensive searches for activeterritories and nest sites in the breeding period. Here we investigate whetherexisting large-scale monitoring programs using baited camera-traps can be usedas an alternative approach to estimate annual abundances of golden eagles.