Thanks to a slow news day, millions of people have already heard of the video of a Golden Eagle grabbing a child in Canada. Obviously, if you’re reading about it here, you know a bit more about birds than the average aficionado of internet hoaxes. Consider some expert testimony: Greg Laden offers up many excellent reasons why the video may or may not be plausible and Kenn Kaufman assures us that the bird isn’t even a Golden Eagle. But you already knew that, didn’t you?
Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds in 2003, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.
I’m not sure that it is not a “golden eagle” … the source of the “hoax” (fake) says it is animated, as is the kid, but the kid is a human kid (not a bigfoot or martian kid). If they say it is a “royal eagle” (gold eagle) then it may well be an animated golden eagle.
Personally, I think the eagle(ish) is busy doing many of the things, on a bad video, that make it hard to identify and I’d like to have seen it longer to narrow down its (made up) identity.
Did anyone see Good Morning America when they showed this video? The hosts were about convinced it was real, and one woman said she hated to take her babies in the park when they were infants because there was a hawk there, and she was afraid the hawk would attack her baby.
Is this what our world is coming to? That people are so ignorant of nature that someone thinks a hawk is going to steal her baby? And then we see this faked video with a Red-tailed hawk call in the background, taking place in Montreal where golden eagles would be very few and far between, if at all, and where the alleged golden eagle doesn’t even look like a golden eagle. And this 8 or maybe 9 lb eagle is said to pick up a baby that must have weighed more than it did. And people still think the video is real.