The Wedge-Tailed Eagle—King of the Skies

A stone’s throw out from the rocky summit of a mountain in Victoria, and in the face of a biting gale that drove all other birds from the sky, a wedge-tailed eagle played. Writer David Hollands witnessed the aerobatic show of a lifetime: “The eagle hung there,” he writes, “virtually motionless and completely at home in this wild medium. . . . As I watched, it dropped, closing its wings to plunge vertically. For a hundred metres it fell and then the wings opened ever so slightly, sending it rocketing upwards to regain most of the height that had been lost in the fall. . . . It levelled out with a half roll, then soared higher [and] repeated the dive again and again, hurtling dramatically into the valley floor and up again in a sustained and thrilling display.”

With an eight-foot [2.5 m] wingspan and a distinctly wedge-shaped tail, this graceful and powerful monarch is impossible to confuse with any other bird in the Australian skies. Its talons can clamp with a force of three tons! For a time, however, the only “proper” way to see a wedge-tailed eagle was down the barrel of a rifle. Like its relative the American bald eagle, which was shot mercilessly to protect the salmon and fur industries, this Australian eagle was persecuted for occasionally taking a lamb. “Few other raptors [birds of prey] in the world,” says the book Birds of Prey, “have been persecuted as severely as the Wedge-tailed Eagle . . . For almost 100 years it was considered vermin . . . , and monetary bonuses were paid for proof of slaughter.”

Over the years, however, the charges were dropped. Its main diet proved to be feral rabbits and occasionally native animals, including wallabies up to twice its own weight. This revelation, at long last, earned the eagle amity with man as well as legal protection.

Eagle