AND I’M PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN… WHERE AT LEAST I KNOW I’M FREE!
Sorry… that’s just an instinctual, patriotic reaction to seeing a multitude of our nation’s bird having a feeding frenzy. I’ll be honest, with all of the fake videos being shared online, I was hesitant to believe this beautiful footage. If you’re like me, you’ve probably never seen this many bald eagles all together in the same place.
This wonderful clip, brought to you by Mark Smith Photography (arguably the modern-day GOAT of snappin’ birds in the wild) even had a caption of, “Yes, this is real” overlayed on top of the footage. That’s how wild this video is. One of Smith’s slogans with his photography is “glad I’m not a fish,” and I’d say that scarily accurate with this bald eagle flurry floating above the water.
Of course, the bald eagle is North America’s most iconic bird and one of the continent’s most formidable, and aggressively opportunistic, avian predators.
Exclusively found in North America, their range stretches from the harsh wilderness of Alaska and Canada down through the continental United States to northern Mexico. They are intrinsically tied to aquatic environments, requiring habitats near large bodies of open water, such as coastlines, major river systems, and expansive lakes, that offer both abundant fish populations and old-growth trees for roosting and nesting.
Boasting a wingspan that can reach up to 7.5 feet, these raptors live up to the name. They’re fierce and powerful. They are equipped with a massive, hooked yellow beak designed for tearing flesh and heavily muscled feet tipped with two-inch, razor-sharp talons capable of exerting hundreds of pounds of pressure per square inch to crush their prey.
While they are highly capable, and able to swoop down at 40 miles per hour to pluck live fish directly from the water’s surface, bald eagles are notoriously lazy hunters. They are aggressive scavengers that will happily gorge on carrion, such as winter-killed deer or livestock. Sometimes they’ll just straight up rob another bird of its catch, or on rare occasion, a fisherman with one on the hook.
Here in Wisconsin, I’m lucky enough to spot the occasional one soaring above the lake, or perched in a tree in my backyard, but if you’ve never seen one in the wild… it’s ALWAYS cool. However, I’ve never seen anything like this…
These bald eagles were swarming and diving all over the place, as they often do… just not usually all in the same place. But this time around, the group of bald eagles were somewhat working together to hunt down (or fish down?) dinner. By the way, a group of baldies can be called a convocation, congress, aerie, and/or army, and any of those have to be the coolest name for a grouping of birds that exists (a murder of crows is a close second).
I don’t know if I can do a description of the video much justice, so I’ll instead let you read Mark Smith’s caption of the event that he documented:
“Seeing hundreds of bald eagles gather like this in a massive flurry feeding frenzy is truly unbelievable. The window of Vertical video is so small too. It’s a fraction of the entire spectacle that happens. It’s as if a huge storm of ancient and mystical energy has been brewing and it’s now raining down eagles.”
Truly remarkable.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, a photographer posts a video of an army of bald eagles all hunting together to keep you on your toes. And in probably the best news I’ve seen in my entire life, these bald eagle feeding frenzies happen more often than you would think. Of course, you probably have to be somewhere in Alaska or British Columbia to see it.
But thanks to conservation efforts, the bald eagle population is thriving. By the mid-20th century, the widespread agricultural use of the pesticide DDT caused their eggshells to become dangerously thin and crack during incubation, pushing the species to the brink of extinction. Following the ban of DDT in 1972 and intense conservation efforts, the population exploded, leading to their official removal from the endangered species list in 2007.
Give Mark a follow if you like eagles… his work is incredible:
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