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I N T H E W O O D S 111 28 eagle attacks toddler! then again, maybe not I’m sure many people saw the video of a large raptor, supposedly a Golden Eagle, flying through the sky, making a steep turn, descending, and trying to carry off a toddler, to the dismay and horror of the onlooking father. Several prominent television stations featured the relatively low-quality video, and it went viral on the Internet, almost certainly causing panic attacks in people who already fear the outdoors. This incident struck a chord with me because as a kid I was blamed for losing track of a small dog during a visit to a farm in southern Minnesota, whose loss was ultimately blamed on a hawk attack. Both are preposterous but show how far some folks have strayed from a basic understanding of the natural world. The bird in flight is not clearly identifiable. It could be an eagle, but the terrifying scream that the bird utters in the slow-motion replay is probably that of a Red-tailed Hawk, definitely not of an eagle (their calls, which they rarely give, are described as high, weak, and whistled). Here is the bottom line. It is basically impossible for a raptor like an eagle to fly away with an object weighing more than 50 percent of its body weight. An adult Golden Eagle female (females are bigger than males) might weigh as much as twelve pounds. So, doing some simple math, the kid would have weighed six pounds at most, and as I recall, most kids weigh more than that at birth. So a toddler? No way. This also means that when you hear stories about eagles flying away with sheep, it’s nonsense, unless it’s just a part of a sheep. The reason is that their wing loading is not designed to handle that kind of payload. Reminds me of the time I was flying from Newark to Minneapolis at Christmas time. The pilot announced that we were being diverted off the runway so that we could rev T H E T H R E E - M I N U T E O U T D O O R S M A N 112 up the engines and burn off fuel so that we wouldn’t be too heavy to take off. Same principle, and certainly got the attention of the passengers. Raptors are, however, capable of killing prey too large to fly away with. One of the environmental services provided by our local Great Horned Owls is killing house cats that are let outside. Granted, the owls can’t fly away with a large cat, but they can certainly kill one and eat their fill. The small lapdogs, same deal. Eagles can kill small deer and sheep, but again they can’t fly away with them. They eat their fill and leave the carcass behind. And still other raptors will take advantage of a carcass—I often see Red-tailed Hawks picking scraps off of road-killed deer carcasses. It was quickly ascertained that the eagle-toddler video was a hoax and was in fact a class project at a Canadian university. But I fear lots of people thought it was true. I’m sure they wanted the video to be a bit murky (like UFO sightings), because people would suspect a high-quality video of being a fake. It looked like someone was just “lucky” enough to be in the right spot at the right time to get the footage, with maybe a telephone camera. I give them pretty high marks, not just for the video but for preying on many people’s lack of common sense about the environment. However, I have to go. I just saw a Sasquatch in my backyard. ...

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