Kleptoparasitism is the phenomenon of one animal stealing food or prey from another animal, and it was on full display last week in very dramatic fashion at the San Juan Island National Historical Park in Washington State. Even better, it was all captured on video!
PublicDomainPictures.net Here’s the story from ScienceAlert.com: Nature photographer Kevin Ebi of Living Wilderness witnessed this “especially dramatic act of thievery” as he spent a day observing young foxes rest, play, and hunt on the park’s grasslands. As he watched, Ebi saw a young red fox catch a rabbit and start carrying it across the meadow, before the scene was violently interrupted from above. “Behind me, I heard the cry of a bald eagle,” Ebi writes on his blog. “I turned around and saw it approaching fast. I knew it wanted the rabbit.”
As Ebi explains, the resulting swoop was even more dramatic than he expected, because the fox didn’t back down from this aerial threat and simply surrender its rabbit dinner. “Instead, the fox, with its jaw still clenched on the rabbit, inadvertently got snagged by the bald eagle,” Ebi explains. “The eagle lifted the young fox and rabbit into the sky triggering an even more dramatic struggle.” For a vivid, disbelief-suspending 8 seconds – captured on video by another photographer present, Zachary Hartje – the fox and eagle frantically tussle over the rabbit as the trio cartwheels across the sky. After a few brief seconds of intense struggle, the eagle dropped the fox and he hit “into a cloud of dust,” according to Ebi.
Kevin Ebi/LivingWilderness.com Here’s more from the Seattle Post Intelligencer: “I just couldn’t believe what I was lucky enough to witness,” he said. The fox was OK – Ebi took extra photos of it from different angles and watched it hunker into a den. After spending several years working on a book about bald eagles, Year of the Eagle, including three years watching a Kirkland nest, “this is by far the most incredible bald eagle hunting encounter I’ve ever seen,” he said. He’s captured lava flowing into the ocean, explored the magma chamber of an old Icelandic volcano and professionally captured wildlife since 2001.
Kevin Ebi/LivingWilderness.com He admits he is “blessed to have a lot of really incredible experiences,” but adds that the fox-and-eagle duel is, “the most dramatic wildlife scene I’ve ever been fortunate enough to capture.” You can see more Ebi’s work on his blog and Instagram pages.