SPY EYES

What happens in the woods when you’re not there to see?

As these images accidentally captured in the snowy forests of Russia reveal, some pretty unbelievable feats of nature take place — the small overtakes the large, the fowl conquers the beast.

A golden eagle digs its talons into the back of an unsuspecting Sika deer and drags it to its death.

In the age of video hoaxes and photo doctoring (thanks child-snatches-eagle tricksters), the photos almost appear too amazing to be true.

But they are indeed legit, according to the London Zoological Society — captured by a “camera trap” designed to document Siberian tigers in southern Russia Far East’s Lazovskii State Nature Reserve.

Not only is it rare to photograph a golden eagle attacking a mammal as large as a deer, it’s an uncommon event to begin with, the scientists say.

“I’ve been assessing deer causes of death in Russia for 18 years — this is the first time I’ve seen anything like this,” Linda Kerley of the Zoological Society of London said.

Dr. Kerley made the discovery when she went to check the camera trap, which is regularly monitored by zoologists working in the forest region.

“I saw the deer carcass first as I approached the trap on a routine check to switch out memory cards and change batteries, but something felt wrong about it. There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died,” she said in a press release.

“It was only after we got back to camp that I checked the images from the camera and pieced everything together. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

The remains of the deer were found two weeks after the attack and steps from where the camera footage was taken.

The sheer rarity of the eagle vs. deer smackdown led her to produce a paper on the subject, published in the current issue of the  Journal of Raptor Research. The paper found that, while golden eagles aren’t known to seize on prey so large, these attacks do happen from time to time.

Her study co-author Dr. Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society said they found numerous, though sporadic, examples of ambitious golden eagles trying to punch well above their weight in the prey department (though they usually go for smaller mammals.)

“The scientific literature is full of references to golden eagle attacks on different animals from around the world, from things as small as rabbits—their regular prey—to coyote and deer,” he said. “The most startling to me was a record from Norway in 2004, when a golden eagle swooped down and carried off a small (about 3 kg) brown bear cub trailing after its mother. Everybody knows not to mess with a brown bear sow with cubs, but that particular eagle was unfazed.”

The image, taken as part of the six-year-long project is a “very rare, opportunistic predation event,” Dr. Slaght said.

Golden eagles are notoriously good hunters and typically weigh 12lbs, stretch their wings eight feet wide and can fly as fast as 160km per hour.

Sika deer stand between 50 and 110 cm tall and males can weigh between 150 and 240lb, though some large stags have been known to weigh 350lb. From the photo, it’s clear this particular Sika deer was not full grown.

National Post