eagle grabs toddler

Chlidonias

Chlidonias

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there have always been stories of eagles snatching little children and flying off with them, although few have come anywhere near to being plausible. However an eagle swooping in to grab a child has apparently been filmed at a city park in Montreal. Is it real or is it fake? Do golden eagles even live in city parks in Montreal?

Looks real to me anyway.

'Eagle swoops and lifts toddler'
 
It looks a bit like a set up with a trained bird to me. The kid is not seen clearly, and there is loss of continuity due to the sasquatch style camera work.
 
I think this is a set-up, not convinced the eagle is carrying the actual child -- possibly switched for a dummy?
Potentially bad for eagles; one excuse for killing them has always been that they eat babies. Personally, I wouldn't leave a baby lying about.
 
It doesn't look like an eagle to me and it doesn't appear to have the wing area to carry a toddler.
But I confess that my experience of this sort of thing is limited to occasional drinks in pubs called 'The Eagle and Child' - which always have babies on their pub signs ;)

Alan
 
gentle lemur said:
It doesn't look like an eagle to me and it doesn't appear to have the wing area to carry a toddler.
But I confess that my experience of this sort of thing is limited to occasional drinks in pubs called 'The Eagle and Child' - which always have babies on their pub signs ;)

Alan
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are you sure you haven't just been stumbling drunk into kindergartens?
 
Chlidonias said:
are you sure you haven't just been stumbling drunk into kindergartens?
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He's going to Irland and stumbling into drunk kindergardeners.;)

I was just about to go post this story. I went to your link but don't see the video on it (maybe just isn't appearing on my laptop) so here's the video-
Eagle Grabs Baby?: Video Of Bird Snatching Child In Montreal Baffles Viewers (UPDATES)

By the way the people who made the video said it was a hoax (in the story I linked).

~Thylo:cool:
 
gentle lemur said:
It doesn't look like an eagle to me and it doesn't appear to have the wing area to carry a toddler.
But I confess that my experience of this sort of thing is limited to occasional drinks in pubs called 'The Eagle and Child' - which always have babies on their pub signs ;)

Alan
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Yes, there are quite a few of them dotted around in England - more than I think can be just airily brushed away. Quite possibly in the dim and distant past when women were out in the fields and put small babies down for a minute, either a Golden or White-tailed Eagle fancied its chances.

The fact that it might very likely not have carried the child off would have been scant consolation - falconers wear those thick, heavy gauntlets for a reason. The damage either species' talons might do to a human baby's internal organs would be terrible.

Chlidonias, what evidence is there in Maori folklore of any interaction with Harpagornis? This would surely have been capable of inflicting lethal damage on any human below a certain size.
 
IanRRobinson said:
Chlidonias, what evidence is there in Maori folklore of any interaction with Harpagornis? This would surely have been capable of inflicting lethal damage on any human below a certain size.
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they would have been able to take out a human of any size! Their natural prey of course were the moa, the largest of which topped 230kg in weight. A Maori walking through the forest, especially if wearing a moa feather cloak, would have looked just like any other prey item to a Harpagornis. There are in fact Maori legends of huge birds that carried people off to eat them, and these almost without doubt refer to Harpagornis.

Just as an aside, it isn't Harpagornis any more, although I still call it that (mainly because I don't like the name Haast's eagle for some reason). It has been moved to the genus Aquila because it is very closely related to the little eagle (A. morphnoides) [which itself was formerly in Hieraaetus...nothing like taxonomy eh?]. I think the little eagle is the world's smallest eagle, so it is quite remarkable that the world's largest eagle descended from it.
 
...although logical if the whacking great Moas on which it used to feed become extinct and all that's left are the much less meaty Kiwis.
 
Chlidonias said:
they would have been able to take out a human of any size! Their natural prey of course were the moa, the largest of which topped 230kg in weight. A Maori walking through the forest, especially if wearing a moa feather cloak, would have looked just like any other prey item to a Harpagornis. There are in fact Maori legends of huge birds that carried people off to eat them, and these almost without doubt refer to Harpagornis.

Just as an aside, it isn't Harpagornis any more, although I still call it that (mainly because I don't like the name Haast's eagle for some reason). It has been moved to the genus Aquila because it is very closely related to the little eagle (A. morphnoides) [which itself was formerly in Hieraaetus...nothing like taxonomy eh?]. I think the little eagle is the world's smallest eagle, so it is quite remarkable that the world's largest eagle descended from it.
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Hmmm... if the eagles were about 15kg, it seems hard to fathom that they could lift a 70kg human and take them off to their nest. I assume, therefore, that you mean that they dive bomb their prey and eat them on the spot? If so, then I could totally see that happening. I think that they could easily fly off with a child though.

Also, like with many other predators, surely they would not have gone for the 230kg moas? Instead, they would have gone for the young, the old, and the weak? Lions wouldn't mind eating elephants, but they don't regularly go for the biggest, heaviest bull.
 
nanoboy said:
Hmmm... if the eagles were about 15kg, it seems hard to fathom that they could lift a 70kg human and take them off to their nest. I assume, therefore, that you mean that they dive bomb their prey and eat them on the spot? If so, then I could totally see that happening. I think that they could easily fly off with a child though.

Also, like with many other predators, surely they would not have gone for the 230kg moas? Instead, they would have gone for the young, the old, and the weak? Lions wouldn't mind eating elephants, but they don't regularly go for the biggest, heaviest bull.
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1) Of course they could have eaten them on the spot. Besides for other eagles, what do they have to look out for?

2) What else did they eat besides moas? I'm sure they could have killed a 230kg moa if they really wanted to. Lions have a hard time just killing younger elephants.

~Thylo:cool:
 
nanoboy said:
Hmmm... if the eagles were about 15kg, it seems hard to fathom that they could lift a 70kg human and take them off to their nest. I assume, therefore, that you mean that they dive bomb their prey and eat them on the spot? If so, then I could totally see that happening. I think that they could easily fly off with a child though.

Also, like with many other predators, surely they would not have gone for the 230kg moas? Instead, they would have gone for the young, the old, and the weak? Lions wouldn't mind eating elephants, but they don't regularly go for the biggest, heaviest bull.
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yes I phrased it badly. The Maori legends are of giant birds carrying off humans to their nests. The legends undoubtably refer to Harpagornis. However they could not have actually carried off a human, but they could very easily have killed one (I know I made it sound like I thought the eagles did carry off humans).

There were a range of large birds in NZ that would/could have provided prey for the eagles, e.g. as well as moa there were also adzebills, giant rails, giant geese, etc. The only firm evidence of what they ate are the talon holes on the bones of moa. There's a moa pelvic bone in Te Papa (the museum in Wellington) which I think was from a Dinornis (the largest moa) which has talon holes in it (they have a Harpagornis foot with the talons through the holes to illustrate it!). I couldn't find a photo of it, but below is a shot of the feet of a golden eagle and a crowned eagle, showing the size of these in smaller birds of prey. Harpagornis didn't need to go after old or infirm prey, it launched itself down from the trees and hit the moa like a freight train. The holes in the moa pelvis are not made from feeding on the carcasse, they were made during the kill - take a moment to imagine the power of a strike that could cause that.
 

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Chlidonias said:
yes I phrased it badly. The Maori legends are of giant birds carrying off humans to their nests. The legends undoubtably refer to Harpagornis. However they could not have actually carried off a human, but they could very easily have killed one (I know I made it sound like I thought the eagles did carry off humans).

There were a range of large birds in NZ that would/could have provided prey for the eagles, e.g. as well as moa there were also adzebills, giant rails, giant geese, etc. The only firm evidence of what they ate are the talon holes on the bones of moa. There's a moa pelvic bone in Te Papa (the museum in Wellington) which I think was from a Dinornis (the largest moa) which has talon holes in it (they have a Harpagornis foot with the talons through the holes to illustrate it!). I couldn't find a photo of it, but below is a shot of the feet of a golden eagle and a crowned eagle, showing the size of these in smaller birds of prey. Harpagornis didn't need to go after old or infirm prey, it launched itself down from the trees and hit the moa like a freight train. The holes in the moa pelvis are not made from feeding on the carcasse, they were made during the kill - take a moment to imagine the power of a strike that could cause that.
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As per earlier comments about women working the fields and leaving babies on the floor, only to have them snatched by an eagle, I think it is plausible (I know you love that word) that a toddler could be snatched by a Haast's eagle and taken to its nest.

A 15kg bird falling talon-first from a 30m tree onto the back of a man would definitely kill him (the man, not the bird :D). The talons in your pics are quite scary, and even those feet are wider than my chest.
 
I'm not buying it. That eagle looks trained to me. Also, doesn't it seem strange that the person points the camera to the ground most of the video?
 
Read the whole post ,and the second I saw that video I could see it was a hoax. Real eagles don't move like that and attacks happen at much faster speeds. If this was real there is a good chance the bird would have struck that kid like a freight train ,flipped around a couple of times on the ground and then mantled over its catch, all the while calling loudly.
 
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