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Interesting sequence of photos caught by a kayaker in California:
http://www.westcoastpaddler.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=1214that was cool!
Those were awesome photos. What a great close incounter with nature. Mother Wolf
Must have been a hungry Eagle if it was trying to catch a goose!
I’ve seen two Eagle attacks that were awesome. One was a Bald Eagle grabbing a Loon on a lake in Northern Minnesota. The other was this past week. A Bald Eagle swooped down near (8′ ish) the head of one of my Scouts on our canoe trip down the Black River.
Eagle Bait, as he is now known, is a smallish kid and was wearing round sunglasses. Looked like a small critter sitting on an orange pad (life jacket) from the air? Maybe it saw the much larger Mosquito Bait (my son) in the canoe with him and called off the attack.
Awesome photo sequence! Thanks for sharing.
And Roger, I almost busted something laughing at your story. Very funny…always wondered how scouts got their nicknames and now I know. 🙂
Sara
awesome photo sequence. I have seen many eagles feeding up in this neck of the woods, and they are basically scavengers, going for stuff already dead. That poor eagle must have run out of already dead stuff to eat. Maybe someone should have helped out our national bird a bit by thumping that goose with a paddle? It was probably Canadian anyway. 😉
zuma
Hey now…. no need for the ‘Canadian’ jab.
Sincerely, Neil YoungYep, Trekkin’ isn’t a real Canadian, although our son’s friends all think that and refer to him as “the Canadian.’ He’s just a Yooper, but close enough to feel lagrac’s pain!
Those photos are incredible, but as a birder myself, I can take the step beyond them and imagine what that encounter must have been like. Wow! We did a canoe cache with Pa Ruby and his family here visiting from North Carolina a few weeks back, and the kids were so excited to have a Bald Eagle kind of “guiding us along” the river. They had never seen one before.
Around these parts, Bald Eagles are incredibly common, but I can remember seeing my first one, too. I was almost 30 when I did. A great success story. And yes, they do like roadkill. And fish. Maybe the eagle thought that goose was a really funny looking muskellunge!
Last week we had a young eagle flying quite close over our canoe. We saw him try to grab fish at least 2 times and miss. Then the next day I was talking to some gals at Curves and they brought up that a friends small dog was grabbed off a pier by an eagle and it happened to be at the same lake where the eagle was circling us… we noticed another young eagle near by but did not see any adult eagles… wonder if it’s just in it’s rebellious teenage years or just a bad hunter willing to grab anything.
Mrs. TEI saw nearly the same thing once in northern Wisconsin. During the early evening, a small flock (about 5 or 6) of geese start making a racket. They are flying like crazy. Then I noticed a bald eagle, I’m guessing about two hundred feet above them and about a quarter mile behind them, coming after them rather quickly. You could see them getting closer together in their formation and then they just kind of rolled over at the last moment when the eagle came in. They got back together right away and really started hightailing it. The flock veered one way except for one dummy (probably a young one) who decided to go his own way. Well needless to say that the eagle went after that one. It was even actually pulling away from the eagle too. But during it’s second time around the lake you can see that it was getting very tired. The eagle had climbed a bit and just took a dive at the goose. You could see the eagle’s legs out in front of it getting ready for the kill, and just before striking the goose, the goose just folded up and did a nose dive into the lake. I thought for sure that the eagle was going in after it, but it pulled up at the last second. The eagle flew off to sit and watch from a tree, and every once in a while, it would leave it’s perch and kind of fake a move towards the goose.
That was one of the coolest things I have ever witnessed. I was rooting for the goose yet at the same time couldn’t help but want to see the eagle claim it’s prize.
I suppose at one point I could have yelled and tried to scare the eagle off, but thats nature. I could never interfere with that.
That was one sight that I will never forget.
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