When eagles go bad, one more time

A little Christmas season/New Year’s present for all my regular readers. The second article ever posted to this blog discussed the fact (note: FACT) that big eagles, most notably the Golden eagle Aquila chrysaetos, are able to attack and kill mammals substantially bigger than they are (go here). Wild individuals will attack and kill deer (including reindeer, roe deer and white-tailed deer) and pronghorn, and there are ridiculous, authenticated cases where Golden eagles have killed domestic calves exceeding 100 kg in weight. Trained individuals in Kazakhstan kill wolves.

I note that those who are ultra-sceptical of the idea that a 6 kg eagle might be able to kill a 30 kg wolf, or a 100 kg baby cow, are never even aware of any of this stuff, let alone familiar with it. Incidentally, I have tried for a while to get TV companies interested in this issue (and in other arcane, fascinating aspects of tetrapod zoology), thus far without any success. In fact I’ll come clean now and tell you that I spent some considerable time during 2006 trying to get various television companies to do some sort of TV spin-off of this blog site. I had in mind something along the lines of Mark O’Shea’s excellent series on dangerous reptiles, and I did actually get quite some interest, but evidently not enough.

Anyway, while surfing recently I noticed Birdchick’s two posts (two links there) devoted to this issue. She was particularly interested in the awesome image shown at top, but had some concerns about its authenticity. I was first sent this image by Steve Bodio of Querencia, and have since used it to death in powerpoint presentations and so on (in my recent ‘Evolution and diversity of the tetrapods’ course I used it as the opening slide). It shows a Golden eagle attacking a Red fox Vulpes vulpes (not a coyote or other canid as some people have suggested) and was taken in Finland in February 2006 by wildlife photographer Pekka Komi of tarsiger.com. Steve first discussed this image here. While a lot of people have seen the best image (the one at top), less appreciated is that it’s part of a series, five of which are posted on the site (go here). We see the two predators confronting each other at a carcass, with the eagle eventually winning the conflict, kicking the crap out of the fox, and the fox then running away. It is not an attempt at predation, and in fact the carcass had been specially laid out to attract raptors.

The fact that the image is part of a sequence of course rules out the whole issue of the best image being mocked-up, and to be honest this thought never occurred to me given that I’m familiar with the idea that a big eagle is well able to tackle a fox. If that seems like a strange or radical idea, then I can understand that the image might be difficult to accept at face value. The trump card is an exciting video clip (from youtube) viewable here on Birdchick’s site: it shows a Golden eagle attacking a fox, though it’s not possible to work out how the whole event ended.

Many thanks to Steve for the supplementary info. This time I will state with confidence that this post is going to be the last one for 2006, and it is kind of ironic, yet satisfactory, that I have figuratively gone full circle, and have ended the year by discussing one of the year’s first blog articles (indeed, one of my first blog articles ever). I can confidently state that something about my blogging will be different in 2007, but as for what that is… you’ll have to wait and see [UPDATE: to see what I was getting at, go here].