I want to fly like an eagle… and steal a drone mid-flight

A pretty cool clip is making the rounds on the internet today. It’s of an eagle plucking a drone from the sky, and then flying away with it.

This apparently first surfaced on Facebook, though we came across it on Reddit. A post with the headline “Eagle plucks a drone out of the sky and flies off with it” contained a gif. And in that gif? What starts out like a regular drone flight skirting a shoreline. But life’s a beach, as you know, and the unexpected happened: An eagle grabbed the drone and flew off with it.

But not before creating some memorable images.

Retrieved from the cloud

It’s unclear what type of drone was flying here, but probably something quite small. Whatever it was, it’s likely sitting in a nest somewhere – because the eagle carried if far away.

And the video? Apparently the pilot recovered it from the cloud. But, due to eagle likely jamming up its gimbal, it was super shaky video. So it was processed with some stabilizing software.

And…here it is:

This isn’t the first time this has happened…and it won’t be the last. Some birds, understandably, perceive drones as a threat. Check out this guy – and talk about accuracy!

What the heck..

As we wrap up this little avian adventure, let’s close with a pelican and a GoPro. This video was a huge hit a few years back. Yeah, there’s no drone. But it’s sure cool:

The moral of the story?

Some birds don’t like drones.

And pelicans? They’re pretty photogenic.