Eagles… symbols of freedom, ‘Merica, and Harley Davidson, there’s a certain elegance that’s associated with eagles, especially the bald eagle.
But ain’t nothing elegant about the way these raptors hunt.
Golden eagles in particular have been known to drag mountain goats off cliffs, have been used by hunters wild pigs and rabbits, and have even been documented trying to fly away with small children. And I’m not talking about goofy AI videos, I’m talking about real life video footage of golden eagles trying to swoop in on a toddler. It’ll blow your mind, but that’s a video for another day…
Skilled, ruthless hunters of the sky… when you look at your pet parakeet, eagles are more akin to flying dinosaurs then they are that bird you keep in a cage at home. And the golden eagle is the undisputed apex avian predator of the open plains and mountainous West. They’re found all over western North America, stretching from Alaska and northern Canada down through the western United States and into central Mexico. You can also find them in Eurasia, especially Norway, Spain, China, Mongolia and Russia, as well as parts of North Africa and the Middle East.
With a wingspan stretching over seven feet, these raptors are heavily muscled and equipped with massive talons capable of exerting hundreds of pounds of crushing pressure per square inch. While they primarily hunt jackrabbits, marmots, and prairie dogs, golden eagles are extraordinarily bold and frequently target mammals significantly heavier than themselves… such as pronghorn.
The pronghorn is the second-fastest land animal on earth, and built like a machine. Massive lungs, an oversized heart, and wide windpipes… it’s believed that they evolved to outrun the long-extinct American cheetah. Cruising at 40 mph and sprinting up to 60 mph, adult pronghorn are virtually untouchable by modern ground predators on the open plains. They rely on their blistering speed and oversized eyes, which provide 320-degree vision comparable to 8x binoculars, to spot and evade danger from miles away.
So when these two species interact, it is almost entirely a brutal predator-prey dynamic centered around the pronghorn’s most vulnerable window: fawning season.
Because a healthy adult pronghorn is too fast and heavy for an eagle to reliably hunt, the raptors shift their focus to newborns in the late spring. For their first few weeks of life, pronghorn fawns do not have the speed to outrun predators. Instead, they survive by lying perfectly flat and motionless in the sagebrush, relying on their tan coats for camouflage. Golden eagles patrol the skies, using their acute vision to spot the slightest twitch or ear flick in the brush before swooping down to snatch the bedded fawn.
If a golden eagle locks onto a fawn, the pronghorn mother will aggressively intervene. Does will run directly under a diving eagle, rearing up on their hind legs and wildly striking at the air with their sharp front hooves in an attempt to bat the massive bird out of the sky.
However, in rare conditions, pairs of golden eagles have been documented taking down fully grown adult pronghorn. When herds are bogged down in deep snow and severely weakened by starvation, eagles will occasionally tag-team a stranded adult, repeatedly diving and striking at its head and spine until the exhausted animal collapses.
But this video right here is a once in a lifetime kind of encounter. Captured somewhere out West, most likely in Wyoming, we see a golden eagle with its talons dug deep into the back of a pronghorn, or American antelope as they’re commonly known. Although, they’re not antelopes…
As the pronghorn stumbles about, the eagle’s talons dig deeper and deeper. You can see the blood spilling from the pronghorn’s back, both from the talons and the pecks and the eagle takes bites out of the flesh of the pronghorns back. I know it looks like AI, but the video is actually quite a few years old, well before AI video content was so commonplace on the internet.
If there’s a worse way to die, I’m not sure I’ve seen it…
Golden Eagle Flies Off With Fox
There’s just something so majestic about watching eagles soar through the sky, but don’t let their looks deceive you; they’re every bit as ferocious as they are beautiful.
Whether it’s swooping from the air to snag fish, ripping geese from the water, or attacking coyotes, there’s no shortage of proof out there that eagles are truly one of the most impressive birds on the planet.
While bald eagles tend to get most of the praise, golden eagles are every bit as incredible, being one of the largest, fastest, and most nimble flying raptors in North America with wingspans over 6 feet, a top speed of 120 miles per hour, and a home range of up to 77 square miles.
A fact that really interested me, though, was their parental skills.
Both mother and father birds both take turns defending the nest, incubating the eggs, hunting for food, and feeding the chicks, and the couples stay together for life, something that’s very rare in nature. Weighing around 6-15 pounds, it only makes sense that their flight power would be pretty great, but I wasn’t expecting it to be as high as we can see in this video.
Unfortunately, there’s not many details available for where it took place or what the context was, but this golden eagle is perched near a cliffside with a fox in its clutches. Suddenly, the eagle powers into the air, bringing the fox along for the ride, which will almost certainly end in death for the poor Vulpes.
Given fox weigh in the neighborhood of 7 to 15 pounds, we see that eagles are capable of carrying their bodyweight or more through the sky, which truly blows my mind.
Put some respect on the golden eagle’s name.
