In the mid-1950s, with a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department, wild bird trainer Ed Durden and his eighteen-year-old son, Kent Durden, capture a young golden eagle on a mountain near Santa Barbara, California. They name her “Lady” and house her in a specially constructed mountaintop aerie. Lady adapts to semi-captivity and accepts Ed as her companion, but she dislikes Kent because he once held her down to trim her talons. Every time she sees Kent from the air, she dive-bombs him. Meanwhile, Ed tests Lady’s intelligence and memory, and is surprised how quickly she learns to use a line of string attached to a piece of meat. Ed also teaches her to make aerial maneuvers on command, so that she can be used in several Hollywood films. One day, Lady lays two eggs, but since they are infertile, Ed replaces them with a fertile goose egg. When the gosling is born, Lady raises him as if he were her own, even though she would have normally made a meal of him. Afterward, Ed brings Lady the eggs of other birds to hatch, in order to eventually prepare her to handle two fertile eagle eggs from the wild. When the eaglets are born, Lady allows Ed to share the parental duties of feeding them and guarding the nest when she is off in the sky. While filming a movie in Arizona, Lady and her eaglets are attacked by a wild eagle, but she drives off the intruder and returns to Ed, battered but victorious. When Lady is sixteen years old, another wild eagle comes to court her, and Ed decides it is time for her to go free in the wild. He opens Lady’s cage and lets her join her new mate. However, Ed cannot stop worrying about Lady. He wanders the mountains where he last saw her, and eventually he sees two eagles circling in the distance. He returns to the mountaintop in his airplane, flies near their aerie, and sees that Lady is safe and free.