However, it is difficult to judge the wingspan and size of the bird at a distance; it could just be forced perspective, exaggeration, or that person was on crack and/or not wearing the proper prescription of glasses or contact lenses if they’re vision is not 20/20.

But…despite all this…it’d have to be a pretty large bird to lift a human child.

I realize there is always the comment that eyewitnesses are unreliable. But that doesn’t mean that EVERY eyewitness is off by 75%.

The idea that what we see is unreliable has become such a mantra that it seems to be forgotten that we are visual creatures. You can’t measure, evaluate, explore or test without “seeing” the results.

Is an estimate equal to actual measurement? No.

But the idea that we can never accept eyewitness sightings for any sort of accuracy is arrogance on the part of “mainstream” scientists.

I realize that this has not really been the focus of this article; this is something that has bugged me for some time now. And this was not about anyone’s posting on this topic.

Just venting.

Where we live, there are frequent problems with owl, hawk, and eagle attacks on domestic animals, mostly poultry. This area supports a large and varied population, but only an occasional individual seems to become a problem. From my observations, I doubt that any of the offending raptors have been healthy before they turned chicken-eater.

Our last attack was by a Great Horned, and in broad daylight. As my mother watched, the owl failed with a glancing hit on the unsuspecting chicken. After the botched kill the huge bird was to impaired to lift off and leave the hen yard. The FS personnel who came to collect it diagnosed it as having, “a body riddled with buckshot”. I suspect that many of the attacks on children may have been caused by an unhealthy bird this way. This could explain why the felling strike was unsuccessful (no talon marks).

Side note: Mono-filament fishing line, strung back and forth in a grid pattern over the hen-pen, put a stop to any future predation attempts. Hmmm, this may not be a bad idea over your children’s play area, if this child-snatching-eagle post is beginning to make anyone nervous.

She said that there were eagles around, in her youth, but not very many of them. They would occasionally take poultry, and when she was still a young adult, in her twenties, one eagle picked up and carried off her older brother’s squirrel dog. I asked her how big the dog was and she said it was a “good-sized fiest” (which is sort of a terrier type dog), and probably weighed about 25 lbs.

They had more problems with chickenhawks (red-tailed hawks) and owls than with eagles, she says; eagles kept mainly to the mountaintops and did not often venture down around human dwellings.

So either we’ve got unknown eagles (or other birds of prey) that are large and strong enough to carry off fairly large children, or we’ve got exaggerated stories based on normal-sized eagle attacks on children.

That said, there is evidence for eagles preying upon very small children, especially ones that might already be injured or sick and unable to struggle.

Also, remember the legend of Ganymede? Zeus fell in love with a young human child and appeared as an eagle to carry him up to Olympus. I’ve always wondered if that was a story that somebody invented to console a grieving family after an eagle carried off a very small child.

That’s the part of this story that always bothered me, too. Given the speed of the bird in its stoop, and the fact that a child’s center of gravity is different than an adult’s, plus the possibility that the boy may have been running in more or less the same direction as the bird, I think it’s possible that a large eagle could lift a 50 lb. child off the ground (probably briefly). But unless that kid was wearing a bullet proof vest, how could a child survive, at least without incurring deep wounds from the talons? Maybe if the child was wearing something like a heavy leather or denim jacket he would escape relatively unscathed, but those birds hit their prey hard. And anyway the incident happened during warm weather, when it would be unlikely that anyone would be wearing a heavy coat.

So I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the Lawndale incident, but I think that something involving a huge bird happened to that family that day.

I agree, it’s very, very unlikely that a previously unknown giant species of raptor exists in the central USA. Maybe it was an unusually large bald eagle. Maybe a Stellar’s; they are awesome birds. Maybe it was an extraterritorial tropical eagle. Maybe it was something other than an eagle, although I think that is much less likely. And I don’t think it’s out of the question that a big eagle could lift a 50 lb. child. Unlikely, certainly, but maybe not impossible.