Amy linked to a really interesting video on Twitter last night.
Here’s a video of an eagle attacking a remoted controlled plane. I’m trying to figure out what type of eagle it is. It looks “booted” (has feathers that go all the way down to its toes) which would suggest golden eagle, but the feather pattern looks more like a juvenile bald eagle…and now I wonder where this video was shot. Is it from Europe or Australia? What species of eagle could this be?
UPDATE: Thanks to blog reader Roy Harvey, we have some great stills of the eagle in question:
Note the white “arm pits?”
The pattern of white ont his bird looks like of like a Jackson Pollock painting, it has white armpits, and it looks like the video is from the Washington state area–it’s an immature bald eagle.
I suppose a golden eagle really would have taken the plane down.
It seems to me as if they were trying to scare it off rather than considering it prey. What do raptor experts think?
Well, it’s juvenile bird, so it could be more curiosity than anything else–can I kill this and eat it or can I scare it away?
It looked like the plane had a feather pattern on the wings so that might have something to do with it. Also, I love that while the eagle is chasing the plane, a crow is chasing the eagle.
I can’t get the video to play, but from the still shots it looks like an Australian Wedge Tail Eagle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge-tailed_Eagle
Capt Jane in Oz.
The title of the video indicated that the plane was a radio controlled eagle. So I would agree with Kirk Mona that the design of the craft may have had something to do with the bird’s interest. Really neat video.
I had to do a program at an RC Air Show for The Raptor Center years ago (someone made a flying lawn mower–that was cool). A couple of guys sheepishly told me a story about a red-tail that showed up and they zoomed their plane closer to it, the red-tail turned and attacked the plane, both came crashing to the ground and the red-tail died and the plane was trashed.
Capt. Jane,
I wondered about wedge-tailed eagle too, but if you look at the bird’s tail in the still photos Roy captured from the video, its tail isn’t “wedgy” enough.
If you click on his name under “Raptor Attack”, you can go to the site where he posts his videos. He is from Seattle and he thought it might be an immature bald eagle.
The guy lives in Seattle…that leaves us with Golden or Bald. I’m going with juvenile Bald Eagle.