Zachary Hartje
Now this isn’t something you see everyday! Talk about a photographer being in the right place at the right time!
Zachary Hartje is a wildlife photographer, and during a recent shoot at the San Juan Island National Historical Park outside Seattle he captured an amazing video showing a fox fighting an airborne bald eagle for a rabbit.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever see anything quite that dramatic again,” – Zachary Hartje
This type of behavior by an eagle is normal. There is actually a name for it – kleptoparasitism.
The term kleptoparastism means nothing short of piracy. The act of stealing.
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Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter to his daughter that he wasn’t that happy about the choice of the bald eagle as a national symbol because of the bird’s reputation for stealing food from other animals. (He also noted that the turkey is “a much more respectable bird.”)
In the video below, the eagle swoops down from above and snatches both the fox and the rabbit which he held in its mouth. During a brief mid air battle, the eagle finally prevailed and the fox was left to find another source of food.
