Holy smokes, this one is tough to watch…
Ravens are some of the most intelligent birds on the planet, but I had no idea the cruelty they were capable of just to get a small meal…
A camera set up to keep an eye on an osprey and her chicks in Satakunta, Finland captured a brutal scene when a raven noticed a fish in the osprey’s nest and decided it was going to get it by any means necessary.
Right from the jump, the mother osprey senses danger and begins calling out in an attempt to scare the raven off, which can be seen swooping back and forth around the nest. Eventually, the raven gets so close that the mother takes off after it.
The two disappear into the woods and begin a fight to the death. In the full length video, they are gone for quite a bit of time, but at the end of the encounter, only one bird returns, and it’s the raven.
The raven lands on the nests edge in harrowing fashion, with the mother osprey’s feathers hanging from its beak. The chicks first appear confused, but quickly realize this isn’t a friendly visitor. The closest of the three is the first to experience the raven’s wrath.
It grabs the helpless bird by the face, lifting it up as it cries in agony and panic, and gives it a shake (most likely breaking its neck) before pecking at it viciously. The other chicks can do nothing but sit and watch in horror, unable to fly away.
The raven then moves on to the second bird, who was standing up and doing what it could to defend itself. Sadly, it suffered the same fate as the first. The third chick moved as far away in the nest as possible and curled up in a ball.
After dealing with the second chick, the raven moves toward the third, but only to pick up its goal this entire time, a very small fish.
It grabs the meal and flies away, leaving behind a gruesome scene of feathers and carnage.
Later, the camera pans out to the far woods where you can see a fox munching on something it found on the ground. As you may have guessed, it was the body of the mother osprey, who was either killed by the raven or left so injured it couldn’t fly.
Absolutely gut wrenching.
Researchers later went to the nest and found that one of the chicks had died while the other was seriously injured, and later passed away from the wounds. The uninjured one was moved to a new nest.
We may think of birds as just cute little chirpers in the backyard trees, but as this video proves, they’re just as vicious as any wild animal.
Here’s the short version of the encounter.
And here’s the full length video,
