A while ago a YouTube video made the rounds that purported to show an eagle swooping down from the skies and carrying off a small child. (Further evidence, if it’s needed, that not everything you see on the internet is true.) I wrote about that absurd video at the time, pointing out that eagles do not carry off children. Nor, of course, do owls, which was a good thing for my grandson Parker. He called to tell me about his close encounter.

“Grandpa! You won’t believe what just happened. An owl flew down right in my face. It scared the daylights out of me.” Parker was leaving his favorite fishing hole at dusk, fishing rod over his shoulder, line and lure dangling down behind his back. He had caught a couple of bass with the lure, which was a rubbery imitation of a frog. Owls and hawks, like bass, relish the idea of a plump frog for dinner. 

Parker identified the attacker as a barred owl. It had targeted the frog-like lure and almost grabbed him in the process. When Parker turned around and was face to face with the aerial predator, the owl aborted its prey-gathering mission. Both boy and owl got a memorable scare. The boy recovered in time to get a photograph of the owl after it landed in a nearby tree.

No owl alive today is going to view a person as prey or carry anyone away. But they do have icepick-sharp talons, and if they got hold of a person, even by mistake, the consequences could be severe—for the person. The idea of an aerial predator swooping down and carrying someone off for a meal is a chilling thought. Yet an enormous raptor known as Haast’s eagle may have done just that centuries ago. The evidence was published by New Zealand scientists in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Biological information about Haast’s eagle is based on skeletal material the scientists examined. As with modern birds of prey, including hawks, owls and eagles, females typically got larger than males, which weighed 27 pounds. Female Haast’s eagles are estimated to have reached a body weight of more than 39 pounds. The weights are based on only a few specimens, so the largest ones were probably over 40 pounds. 

A 40-pound flying bird is huge. To put the size in perspective, the largest bald eagles are around 3 feet in body length, have an outstretched wingspan of slightly under 8 feet (which is right big in itself), but weigh, on average, less than 15 pounds. Haast’s eagles are indisputably the largest eagles known to science.  

What was the primary prey of these giant eagles? Moas, the big flightless birds native to New Zealand. Some were over 10 feet tall, larger than ostriches. Moas and Haast’s eagles are gone now, the former because of relentless hunting and the latter because its main prey base was driven to extinction. Things might have persisted in equilibrium into modern times, with big eagles eating big flightless birds, if the Maoris had not arrived in New Zealand in the late 1200s. The Maoris could easily capture and kill the moas, which had not encountered such a relentless land predator and never evolved the ability to fly. Maoris may have killed off the moas, the main food for the eagles, but the thought comes to mind that these original settlers of the islands likely got cricks in their necks from keeping a close watch on the skies for incoming eagles. They probably admonished their children to “watch for eagles, and run like the wind if you see one.”

For Parker, the final outcome of his close encounter was a satisfactory one. Things would have been a bit more exciting if the owl had hit its mark and taken the frog lure. Reeling in a barred owl out of a tree would be a much harder task than landing a big bass.

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