Spotting a bald eagle in the wild is one of the most exciting sights you can see.
My family used to head to my aunt and uncle’s lake house and my grandpa would park himself in a lawn chair and scour the skies in hopes of seeing one soar down the bend of the river and fly past the house. One those days when one did appear, you’d never heard a happier man yell out “A eagle!” in a classic grandpa joke, but the excitement was very much real.
Unfortunately, this video doesn’t show the majestic qualities of a bald eagle. In fact, it shows one’s unfortunate demise at the hands of one of nature’s cruelest beasts.
Alligators have been around for the past 65 million or so years, and while they’re not technically dinosaurs, they did live at the time when some dinosaurs roamed the earth, which may just make them cooler than the T-Rex and Triceratops, since they survived and the others didn’t.
Native to the southeastern parts of the US, especially Louisiana and Florida where over 1 million roam the waterways, gators grow to over 14 feet and 1,000 pounds if given the time and resources, and will quite honestly eat anything, including other alligators.
Bald eagles are found in every state except Hawaii. Alaska has the highest population of our nation’s bird, with over 30,000 estimated to live in the state according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
While we don’t know what state this video comes to us from, my guess is Florida, considering they have tons of alligators and around 3,000 bald eagles, but that’s just a guess.
Regardless, a group of people were out enjoying a day in nature when they spotted a bald eagle in the water. Typically they don’t spend much time actually swimming, so it’s assumed this guy had some injuries that prevented him from flying away.
And as they tend to do, an alligator spotted the bird and recognized a good opportunity for a large meal.
This looked to be a decent sized eagle, meaning it weighed around 10 pounds, plenty of mean for this young gator to be satisfied for quite some time.
While the poor eagle splashed around in the water and tried to get out, the gator stealthily slid over roots and through the water in pursuit. Although you have to give the bird credit for trying, there was really no hope and the gator was able to close its jaws on the bird and began to pull it under.
Naturally, the crowd was pretty upset, but hey, alligators have to eat too and that eagle found itself in the middle of the gator’s world.
Score one for the scaley fellas.
