In one of the most defying sights that nature has ever offered, a bald eagle couple adopts and feeds a baby hawk. The odd occurrence left bird watchers in Canada completely baffled as hawks are usually a food source for the massive pray birds. Actually that’s how the tiny hawk got into the eagle’s nest in the first place.
The baby hawk was meant to be food for the tiny eaglets, but beating all the odds it is now thriving after the bald eagle family adopted it. It even acts as a bald eagle. Now the red-tailed baby hawk apparently lives in a perfect harmony with its adoptive parents and its three eaglets brothers.
“This rates as the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in the world of birds of prey,” David Bird of the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, told the Vancouver Sun. “My guess is that this little hawk begged loud and hard for food – not even thinking about the danger.”
A behavior like this is very unusual for a bird of pray, especially for bald eagles. However, biologists fear about the little one’s life by the time when the eaglets would grow much more bigger than their hawk sibling and eventually see it as food. “The fact that it survived so long is absolutely amazing,” professor Bird said. “But the thing is that he was much smaller, and eagles always prey on things that are weaker than them.”
But even so, bird experts are confident and hope the eagles will keep the baby hawk around until it will be able to fly all by itself. But that may depends on a lot of things such food abundance or the eagles temperament. Anyway so far so good as the three month old hawk looks in a very good shape. “The eaglets that he was raised with seem to have accepted him as another sibling, and the parents seem to have adopted him as their young,” professor Bird also said.
