I saw one of the coolest things in nature the other day. I was doing my habit trail routine on the elliptical in the gym the other morning when I saw two birds zipping across the sky. The first thing I noticed was the lead bird had a white head and tail. The trail bird was of equal size and had darker markings.
The birds seemed to mirror each other as they banked, dove, rose, turned, etc. My guess is that the large bald eagle had poached in the equally large golden eagle's AO and was now catching hell for it.
Still, despite how closely the golden harassed the bald, he couldn't quite catch him nor force him out of the area. Thus, up came Mrs. Golden Eagle. It took her a few minutes to get up to altitude and air speed and catch the other two raptors in the aerial combat.
After another couple minutes of hard flying with two pissed goldens on his six, the bald eagle leveled out flat and almost seemed to accelerate as he took up a heading towards the mountains. The golden eagles tried to keep up for a short distance and then veered back to make several victory laps over their domain.
As Mrs Golden drifted back down to the cluster of trees, Mr. Golden coasted over to a nearby pond, likely to grab a duck or small goose for chow to fill up on after such a drawn out dog fight.
It was then that I noticed the sky began to rapidly fill back up with several flocks of migratory waterfowl. I recalled how there wasn't another bird up there during the entire engagement. Well, there was one foolish little thing who probably saw only one eagle and was going to pester him. I watched him get about halfway up and then he mysteriously dropped out of the air like a rock. I guess the pattern was indeed full.
Coincidentally, I had the soundtrack from Gladiator playing on my iPod as the fracas played out. Pretty cool thing to witness.
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