Eagle takes down deer, another reason why you should visit Siberia

Besides being home to the Yeti, Siberia is apparently also home to an eagle that's large and powerful enough to take down a small deer. Researchers from the Zoological Society of London had set up a game camera to capture images of endangered Siberian tigers, but instead, found images of this golden eagle capturing a young sika deer. The researchers, Linda Kerley of the Zoological Society of London and Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society, recently published several images of the "deathmatch" in the September issue of the Journal of Raptor Research. They were quoted in Fox News:

"I saw the deer carcass first as I approached the trap on a routine check to switch out memory cards and change batteries, but something felt wrong about it. There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died." said lead author Kerley, who runs the camera trap project. "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."

Slaght noted that golden eagles have a long history of eyebrow-raising predation attempts.

"The scientific literature is full of references to golden eagle attacks on different animals from around the world, from things as small as rabbits—their regular prey—to coyote and deer, and even one record in 2004 of an eagle taking a brown bear cub."

[via Fox News]