For decades, circumstantial evidence has shown that Golden Eagles do indeed attack large mammals like deer and even bear cubs.
But in a paper published Monday in the Journal of Raptor Research, Linda Kerley of the Zoological Society of London and Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society unveiled stunning images of an adult Golden Eagle attacking and killing a young sika deer, weighing 88 to 100 pounds.
The images were captured by a camera trap the researchers set up to study Siberian (Amur) tigers in the Russian Far East.
Instead, the cameras captured what the authors of the paper say may be the first "documentation" of such an attack.
"In 11 [years] of our investigations of ungulate kills in the southern Russian Far East, this is the first time we observed evidence of a Golden Eagle killing any deer species, despite locating hundreds of carcasses during that time and assessing cause of death," the authors wrote.
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In a statement, Kerley said they first came upon the carcass during a routine camera check and she immediately knew something was odd.
"There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died," Kerley said. "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."
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