Watch: Eagle Has Enough of Drone, Shows Who's Really Master of the Skies
Here’s a fact of life you may not know: drones and eagles do not have a good relationship. In fact, more often than not, they have a really, really, really bad one.
As an example of what I mean, consider what happened when a nature lover by the name of Micah Hatcher recently attempted to use his GoPro Karma drone to capture a scenic video of Professor Creek, a little body of water located in Mary Jane Canyon near Moab, Utah.
An eagle wound up attacking his drone, causing it to plummet to the ground like Wile E. Coyote tied to an anvil in Warner Brothers’ classic cartoon “Loony Tunes.”
“He nailed it so fast all I saw was the drone go down from about 120 feet in the air,” Hatcher wrote on YouTube. “I’ll be honest, I ducked for cover because it was almost directly over my head. It landed about 8 feet in front of me.”
Being as Hatcher loves nature, however, he wasn’t even slightly worried about the fate of his drone. He was worried about the eagle instead.
“I am an animal lover and I especially like raptors. I would have never flown in his area had I known he was there and I’m especially glad that he wasn’t harmed,” he wrote.
Awwww.
Watch footage from his drone below courtesy Hatcher’s YouTube channel, “High & Mighty Hikes”:
Here’s another fact of nature you may not know: this uncanny ability by eagles to totally take down any drone has been used by military forces to thwart terrorism.
Last year Fortune magazine explain that the French military were training golden eagles “to spot drones and perform mid-air takedowns”:
“(T)he soldiers began by serving meat to the young eagles on the ground using drones as dinner plates. When the eagles grew a bit older, the trainers then presented them with drones hovering in the air — to predictable results. The eagles swooped in and seized the drones in talons that can exert pressure of 500 pounds per square inch.”
Watch a demonstration of this awesome capability here. Very cool, right?
According to The Washington Post, the goal was to essentially create a natural defense against terrorists who have “been modifying devices that can be bought in toy stores into weapons and radio-controlled spies,” i.e., drones.
It’s unclear whether the mission was successful, but judging by the intense beating Hatcher’s drone received from an untrained eagle, I’m pretty sure it was.
Please share this story on Facebook and Twitter and let us know what you think about the uncanny ability of eagles to take down a drone.
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