Some gnarly bird-on-bird crime right in the middle of the day, and right on the back of a guy’s truck.
Ever seen a hawk showcase its power and the work it can do with its sharp talons? Chances are you’ve come across a video of a hawk making short work of some prey before, but I doubt you’ve seen it like this. This footage below shows just how brutal nature can be, and that birds have to keep an eye out for other birds.
When it comes to hunting, one of the most gifted predatory birds is the hawk. There aren’t many living beings in the Animal Kingdom that can rival the eyesight and hunting abilities of the sharp-taloned bird. “Eyes like a hawk” wasn’t just made up out of nowhere. Whenever all of the common sayings were being created (and I’m not sure when that was), one was needed to explain something or someone with exceptional eyesight, and the hawk was the perfect example.
Hawks utilize their eyesight, which is eight times better than a human’s, to track down prey that’s below them. Now when I use the word “below,” that usually means what they’re going after is on the ground, but that’s not exactly the case with this video.That being said, we don’t know how this hawk brought down a slightly smaller grackle (a black bird).
The video picks up with a hawk – which appears to be a Cooper’s Hawk – confidently standing over the top of the grackle, and pinning it down on the back of a guy’s truck. It’s possible that the hawk either a) knocked the grackle out of the sky or b) dive-bombed the blackbird as it was sitting on the truck bed.
However, it sounds like option A was what actually played out, because the truck owner was inside of his vehicle when all of this happened. As he’s taking the video, he can be heard saying this:
“Look at this! It just caught that grackle and slammed into my truck. How awesome is that?”
Not so awesome for the grackle, obviously, but definitely a very fascinating video for the rest of us non-grackles to enjoy.
What happens towards the end of the footage is admittedly a bit ruthless. After holding down the smaller bird for a bit, the hawk eventually turns the lights out on the grackle using its sharp talons and puts it out of its misery. We don’t see what happens after that, but one could assume that the hawk either chowed down right there or flew off with its dinner to eat it elsewhere.
And it’s one of those right-place, right-time situations for the guy behind the camera (not so much for the poor black bird). What are the odds that the hawk would be on the hunt and slam down onto his truck with freshly captured prey? He then got to shoot what happened next as he was mere inches away from the hawk – with only the rear window separating himself and the harsh scene playing out on the back of the truck.
Check it out:
“Yeah.. so this happened! Nature is both beautiful and brutal at the same time.”
