Kreeg van het Care2 team een artikel waarin wordt beschreven hoe een witkopzeearend (of Amerikaanse zeearend, of zuidelijke witkoparend), een kuiken van de roodstaartbuizerd grootbrengt (de buizerd, voor wie de zeearend een ‘aartsvijand’ is, ofwel de buizerd valt vaak ten prooi aan de zeearend).

Het gedrag van deze zeearend, is een mooi voorbeeld voor de immer verdeelde en oorlogvoerende mens, oorlogen waarin het leven van een kind niets waard is. Of neem de boycot die de VS in de 90er jaren oplegde aan Irak, een boycot die voor meer dan 500.000 kinderen een gewisse dood betekende (waar een aantal deskundigen zelfs spreken over 1 miljoen overleden kinderen….)

Nu een prachtig verhaal, waarin een paar opties worden gegeven, hoe dit ‘humane gedrag’ van deze zeearend te verklaren zou zijn:

Bald
Eagle Adopts Baby Hawk Instead of Eating Him

By: Laura
Goldman
June 15, 2017

In
the wild, bald
eagles and red-tailed
hawks are
natural-born enemies, frequently fighting each other to the death –
with larger bald eagles typically winning those bloody battles.

That’s
why it’s so amazing that instead of serving her offspring a
4-week-old red-tailed hawk she may have snatched, a bald eagle in
British Columbia has literally taken the young bird under her wing,
raising it alongside her three eaglets.

A
raptor expert says this is extremely rare in nature. Why was the
hawklet’s life spared? One theory is that the mother bald eagle’s
hormonal urge to kill it was overwhelmed by her hormonal urge to feed
it when the hungry hawklet started squawking for food.

“What
probably happened in this case is that when they brought this little
guy back, he probably begged for food, as he would do, not even
realizing the danger it was in,” Dr. David Bird (yep, that’s his
real name) told CTV
News.

Food
overrides everything for bald eagles, Bird told the Vancouver
Sun.
“He begged away and mom and dad said, ‘Okay, here’s an open,
gaping beak. Let’s put food in it.’”

David
Hancock of the Hancock
Wildlife Foundation has
a more gruesome theory of how the hawklet may have ended up in the
nest.

Red-tailed
hawks often dive-bomb bald eagle nests. “If the attacking red-tail,
egg in oviduct, did get carried back to the nearby eagle nest, it is
not unlikely that either in the death throes or upon being torn apart
(less likely in my experience!) the egg got deposited into the eagle
nest,” Hancock wrote in
a blog.

No
matter how the hawklet got there, Bird said this type of amazing
“adoption” has only been documented a couple of times in the
history of science.

However,
the red-tailed hawk is only half the size of its “siblings,”
which may eventually pose a problem.

“(If)
one of those eaglets gets hungry, they’re going to look at this
little hawk and say ‘I’m bigger than you, you’re weaker than me
and I’m going to just squeeze the life out of you and start eating
you,’” Bird rather luridly told CTV News.

It
also won’t help that sibling rivalry and fratricide is not uncommon
in eagles, according to Hancock.

But
for now, the hawklet appears to be very comfortable in his adopted
home, in a Douglas fir at the Shoal Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary.

“I’ve
seen it standing on the edge of the nest, right beside two eaglets,
and looking very, very cocky and sort of proud of itself,” Bird,
chuckling, told CTV News.

The
bald eagle’s nest, easily visible with binoculars, has been in the
tree since 1991 and is popular with birders. Kerry Finley, the
sanctuary’s caretaker, lives in a house next to the tree and wasn’t
initially aware of the hawklet being there.

“It
wasn’t until people started showing up with big cameras that I
noticed that there was something amiss in the nest,” he told the
Vancouver Sun.

Finley
agreed with Bird that the hawklet is extremely confident. “It’s
quite something to see the way it is treated,” he said. “The
parents are quite attentive. The other birds are keeping their
distance — they know it is something different.”

Photo
credit: YouTube