About half a dozen readers have sent me this series of photographs, showing an incident reported in several places, including Nature News and the Daily Mail (quotes from the former, photos [credited to Linda Kersey of the Zoological Society of London] from the latter). It show what seems to be the first documented attack of a golden eagle on a deer.
In a series of three images over the course of just seconds, a camera trap in the Russian Far East photographed a golden eagle [Aquila chrysaetos] attacking a sika deer [Cervus nippon].
A camera trap in the forest of the Russian Far East captured rare and surprising images of a golden eagle attacking a young sika deer.
Golden eagles are not known to attack deer, but the image of the bird latched on to the deer’s back and bringing it down to the snowy ground is as clear as it is puzzling. The eagle’s attack was successful, researchers later found the deer’s carcass a few yards away from the camera trap.
“I’ve been assessing deer causes of death in Russia for 18 years — this is the first time I’ve seen anything like this,” said Linda Kerley of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), who found the images so compelling that she co-authored a paper on the attack in the Journal of Raptor Research.
Kerley said she was preforming a routine check to switch out the camera trap’s batteries and memory cards when she noticed the deer carcass in the snow. But something in the scene was off, she said.
“There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died,” Kerley said. “It was only after we got back to camp that I checked the images from the camera and pieced everything together. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
It looks as if the eagle is trying to fly away with the deer, though they’ve been known to attack prey clearly un-carryable.
Camera trap images are typically recordings of common prey species and occasionally a resident or transient tiger, so seeing an image of an eagle in the act of taking down a deer was unexpected. But Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Kerely’s study co-author, said golden eagles have a well-documented history of eyebrow-raising predation attempts.
“The scientific literature is full of references to golden eagle attacks on different animals from around the world, from things as small as rabbits — their regular prey — to coyote and deer, and even one record in 2004 of an eagle taking a brown bear cub,” Slaght said.
Slaght added that Kerley was “really lucky” to have obtained images of such a rare and opportunistic predation event.
And the remains. This is of course saddening, but it’s nature red in beak and claw. I’m amazed the deer couldn’t get away.
Nature, you scary.
Humans – a product of Nature – even scarier!
You’ll be surprised by just how much a golden eagle can actually carry. See this video on YouTube, especially as from 5:00 – watch?v=ybUAMTJbW00
Poor goats. 🙂
These are not goats, they are chamois. Yes, poor chamois, but that’s life and nature.
But chamois a wild species of goat, or a close relative, no?
It is a goat-antelope, a mid-sized bovid.
“The chamois (along with sheep and goats) are in the goat-antelope subfamily (Caprinae) of the family Bovidae.”
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The eagle must have been VERY hungry and the deer must have been very young or ill…..
I wonder if the eagle’s grip was causing some back leg paralysis? It’s a huge bird, but even eagles are light in weight, too light to cause the deer to stumble.
I’ve read that the golden eagle grip is (if I remember correctly) fifteen times the strength of a human grip, so perhaps.
I’m confused. I was sure I remembered reading about golden eagles attacking ungulates, which I assumed referred to deer. But the post describes this as the first documented such attack, but then quotes Jonathan Slaught as saying “from things as small as rabbits — their regular prey — to coyote and deer”. Am I missing something?
It is from the British tabloid The Daily Mail which doesn’t shine with good journalism…
I recall reading or seeing something about some researchers studying Reindeer discovering that Golden Eagles were predating them.
Apparently there were a certain percentage of Reindeer kills that did not match any known pattern and the researches eventually decided to make a determined effort to try and catch sight of what ever was making the mystery kills.
Eventually they managed to record video, at fairly long range, of a Golden Eagle attacking and killing a Reindeer. The eagle made repeated strikes then leisurely followed the Reindeer until it eventually dropped. Upon examining the carcass they found that the Eagle had pierced the Reindeer’s lung.
Piecing their observations together they surmised that the eagles would fly in fast and strike with their talons extended at just the area of the Reindeer’s side where it is possible for its talons to reach the lung. Once the eagle makes a successful strike it then follows the mortally wounded Reindeer until it succumbs, for mile if necessary.
The pattern of this observed kill matched the pattern of the mystery kills.
Tried to find something about this to link to, but no luck. I seem to remember this was in a documentary I watched on PBS. I found nothing specific about it, but found many references about punctured lungs in animals killed by Golden Eagles.
That’s macabre!
Macabre? Well, maybe It’s certainly inventive, and Nature has always been good at that.
That said, it has long been a traditional allegation of Highland gamekeepers that eagles can take valuable animals – both sheep and deer – which they have long used as an excuse to poison, shoot and trap raptors. Fortunately that’s now illegal, and regular prosecutions and convictions are slowly changing attitudes amongst the keepers, and more importantly, among the landowners.
I would guess that if they needed evidence for this, they’d be able to point out deer or sheep kills without associated fox prints – which I’ve seen myself, though I don’t claim to be a tracker of any sort, just a random hillwalker.
Now that we appear to have beavers spreading more-or-less naturally, the topic of re-introducing wolves is going to rear it’s head again.
Well, now that you mention it, USian ranchers report problems with eagles taking lambs as well. And we have reintroduced wolves in many states. And it has led to predictable problems!
What some people see as a problem, others see as an opportunity. As a regular hillwalker (whiose wife drags him into B&Bs these days, instead of taking my tent) I can understand the views of both the livestock farmers and the hotel/ B&B/ restaurant/ shop owners. The ultimate balance of benefit from (say) re-introducing the wolf would probably redistribute some of the current income streams, but I honestly don’t know if it would increase the net regional income or decrease it. I’ll let the interested parties argue that amongst themselves, but I’m certainly not going to oppose re-introduction of the wolf on ecological grounds.
I wonder how it actually made the kill?
The beak _is_ red. Maybe that is how they usually kill?
Hmm…beak to the jugular perhaps.
I don’t know how they usually make the kill. Any eagle aficionados out there?
It is usually the talons, not the beak, that does the damage.
A Bird Came Down the Walk — E Dickinson
A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He ripped poor Bambi into halves
And ate the fellow, raw.
Now this is a coincidence. I opened the comments on this thread with the intent of quoting Dickinson, thus:
That eagle hasn’t read much poetry: “Nature, the gentlest mother is…”
Apologies for the gruesome suggestion, but some predators start eating before the prey is dead. The eagle really only needs to ensure the deer is too weak to escape or strike back; then it can feed.
It seems like puncturing a lung is a common tactic for the Golden Eagle, for larger prey anyway. Lots of references of that when you run a search on the topic.
It looks like the eagle tried to lift it. Perhaps the deer died from trauma, or just disabled, then got picked clean by the eagle and other animals that followed. It looks like there was a broken leg at least.
It’s sad for the deer, but wolves and coyotes have been killed off to the point that deer overpopulate what habitat they have left and either invade gardens for munchies & get shot, or they die from starvation. At least this deer died in the service of a noble cause.
This event was in Eastern Siberia. No coyotes, but no real shortage of wolves. Or bears. Tigers in noticeably short supply though.
“eyebrow-raising predation attempts”
Yup, you know you’re really an apex predator when people’s eyebrows go up at your predation attempts.
Forgive my language, but that’s a bad ass bird. Who knew death could come from the sky when you get that size. Shades of Harpy eagles.
Or actual harpies. 😉
Anyway, another example of a loving God, a God that loves the creatures it (he, she?) created.
Yeah, a benevolent God that intelligently and willfully designs organisms that literally steal (aka kill and take) the raw materials to survive from each other. If God was all that smart, he would have pushed the chloroplast angle and worked it into a mobile design; then we would all be solar powered.
We are, just one or two steps removed.
Whither manna from Heaven?
No, it was not attempting to fly off with it. It was using wings for balance. That’s it.
Perhaps they mean first documented wild eagle… it is already known golden eagles raised and handled by falconers will readily go after deer, foxes, wolves. Ancient tradition by Mongolians to use eagles to capture foxes for pelts and also a thing for them to set them on wolves. The eagles do indeed capture and hold down foxes and wolves for the falconer to run up on horseback, not sure how often they successfully kill them without aid though.
There are youtube videos of both captive goldens set on deer and also on traditional Mongolian use of them in hunting foxes and wolves.
A while back I read something on an alleged instance where a pair of wild golden eagles had to be “removed” because the pair had learned how to kill calves and were killing more than a few of them. I seem to recall this was in New Mexico..? Anyways the point is, if true, this would be a recorded instance of wild goldens killing large hoofed animals.
Perhaps they historically had populations/individuals that regularly hunted and killed large animals but this behavior largely disappeared with human persecution. This idea has been said of lions that hunt elephants- seems so shocking now but perhaps when the lion population was much larger and widespread, this was a regular thing… with population decimation, this “knowledge” of killing elephants was lost from remaining populations.
Hunting with eagles in Kazakhstan: YouTube watch?v=-Y3Dl0BGFfw
Thank you! You saved me a search for that.
Reblogged this on Moore Laboratory of Zoology.
well I know nothing about spines or nervous systems but if the eagle used its beak on the deers back it might have been easier to immobilise the deer than you might think?
Just one more thing to worry about during leisurely hikes through the pumpkin patch.
Reminds me of my favorite little birdy, the Haast’s Eagle, sadly now extinct.
Or maybe that should be gladly now extinct because there are stories among the Maori that a monstrous bird they called the Pouakai killed and ate people.
Haast’s Eagles hunted moas in New Zealand. The largest species of moa could be up to 12 feet tall and 530 pounds. Both the eagles and moas went extinct around 1400 CE not long after the Maori colonized the island, cleared the forests for farmland and hunted the moas to extinction.
The theory is the eagle would dive onto the moa from above and behind, slamming into the prey and sinking its claws into the moa’s spine in an attempt to paralyze it. The moa would collapse to the ground. Then the eagle would attack the moa’s head/neck with its beak and claws and either wait for its prey to bleed out or outright kill it in its squawking feathered fury!
http://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com/species/h/haast%27s-eagle.html
Thanks for posting. I’d forgotten about that beast!
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.
Reblogged this on Randomness of a Schizo 😉 and commented:
This is amazing.
Although this may be unusual for golden eagles, it is not all that uncommon for wedge-tail eagles to attack and kill kangaroos; which would be comparable in size to this deer.
Actually a photographer here in Illinois captured photos of a golden eagle pursuing and attacking a doe near Nachusa Grasslands a couple years back. Worth a view at http://www.ilbirds.com/index.php?topic=32809.0
Thank you for that link to a fantastic series of images!
Hmm, the legs of the deer are more or less in the same pose in all pictures even though it moves through the frame (assuming no cropping afterwards). The same goes for head, neck, ears. And in fact the same is true for the eagle.
Might be genuine … might not. As this is the internet, I will remain doubtful for now 🙂
Interesting! I’ve only ever seen the aftermath at our cottage – stripped bones, pelt and a couple of bald eagles hanging around. http://www.flickr.com/photos/neeroc/4979762020/in/photolist-8A3zKS-8A3zKQ-8T8pez/
i’ll have to see if i can still find the explanation i read online somewhere, but the eagles go for the neck/spine, but they only use their wings for balance, the dealbreaker is the blunt force trauma. they hit with such speed and impact to attempt to break the neck/spine. They will hang on for a bit and if necessary they’ll come around and hit them a second and third time. They hunt wolves the same way.
found it, it definitely explains a lot on how kills are performed.
fwp.mt.gov/mtoutdoors/HTML/articles/2012/talons.htm
Fascinating, albeit macabre. Thanks for posting this!