Fly Like an Eagle: Wildlife Cam Gets Taken on a Wild Ride by a Curious Bird

Try all the tricky ski moves and skateboard jumps you want, but it’ll be hard to beat the latest action video auteur — a curious Australian sea eagle who snagged a wildlife camera to create a brief but exciting aerial tour of his neighborhood.

The incident happened in May on a remote stretch of the Margaret River in western Australia, where rangers had set up a camera trap to monitor freshwater crocodiles. When the camera disappeared within a couple of weeks of its placement, the rangers figured that was it, imagining the rig must have been uprooted and fallen into the river.

At least that’s what they thought until a couple of weeks ago, when the camera was discovered by a ranger in another section of the wildlife reserve almost 70 miles away.

A little cleaning up and tweaking, and the rangers managed to recover three 30-second clips showing a juvenile sea eagle picking up the camera, taking it for a quick flight and then pecking at it on the ground.

Rangers say the fact that it was juvenile is the only reason they found the cam intact, explaining that an adult eagle would have immediately dropped the camera from a great height to make sure it was dead.

“It was pretty amazing because it’s one of the first camera traps to ever get picked up,” ranger Roneil Skeen told ABC. “An adult one would have flown it right up the top and yeah for sure it would have smashed that camera.”

Skeen said rangers have already devised more secure rigging for future camera traps.

(via ABC)