NEW YORK — If you’re an eagle, you hunt. It’s what you do.
If you’re a drone that gets in an eagle’s way, you’re SOL — it’s what you get.
Earlier this summer a magnificent wedge-tailed eagle in Australia effortlessly destroyed a drone in mid-air. The giant bird used its talons to “punch” the flying device, which almost immediately dropped from sky and lay on its side, whirring in a sad, slow-death like way.
A YouTube video of the epic take-down has gone viral over the past week. As of Thursday afternoon, the 15-second footage has been viewed almost 1.8 million times in five days.
The eagle is fine, according to the drone’s operating company Melbourne Aerial Video. It even hovered above the wounded drone for a little while after knocking it down.
Perhaps the coolest thing about this latest nature versus tech showdown is the fact that we got a glimpse of what’s like to be prey.
“This is the last thing a small bird sees when a wedge-tailed eagle decides that you are dinner…” Melbourne Aerial Video wrote.
People seem to love watching tech get taken down by wild animals. There are dozens and dozens of videos of hawks, rams and kangaroos smacking down drones that have gotten millions of views on YouTube.
In March, a female chimp at a Netherlands zoo swatted a drone out of the air with a stick. The drone was being used to shoot a TV show.
“Once the intelligent apes discovered the spying plane … they immediately armed themselves with long sticks,” zookeepers posted on a YouTube page.
