Eagle Takes Seagull

Nature is usually peaceful. Most animals live at a walk, and the great cataclysms of a lively planet are the exception, not the rule.

Recently things got wild -- literally -- on the Slip Point beach, in Clallam Bay, on the upper west end of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula.

The bald eagles are nesting on Bear Kill ridge, above the rocky tidepool beach, and their young families are hungy. The eagles' usual diet is greenling or flatfish, with an occasional trout or salmon. They scavange leftovers at fishing derbies.

But when their kids are yelling for food, the adult eagles go out and grab whatever they can get. They raid crows' nests. They chase Raven. They eye pets. People lock up cats and small dogs until the young eagles fledge; it's just part of life. Wild animals can't go to McDonald's or Safeway, after all. But they don't get their food for free; for predators it can be a literal fight.

The seagulls usually ignore the eagles soaring overhead. One seagull resting on the beach got a horrible surprise when a big eagle drifting above suddenly folded its wings and dropped with outstretched talons.

The eagle grabbed the gull by the shoulders. The gull - a big bird -- didn't go easily. It snapped at the eagle with its big sharp bill. It still had full use of its wings, and it hauled the eagle into the surf. It struggled underwater, pulling the eagle down. The big predator had to give up and flap soggily into the air.

But it wasn't over.

The gull didn't fly; exhausted, shocked, it was still floated low in the water. The eagle circled, hit the gull and hauled it into the air again. The gull forced the eagle back into the water. Over and over, four times in all, eagle and gull wrestled into the air and back into the bay.

Sudden screaming from above signalled the arrival of what was probably the gull's mate. Nesting crows -- who had lost chicks to the eagles the day before - came to unintentional rescue. They mobbed the eagle, trying to hit it in the back of the head. Even a resident loon came paddling in, giving its weird whistle as it came.

The eagle, exhausted and harassed, finally gave up and flew into a fir tree to rest. The tree was too close to the crows' nest, and they forced the predator down the beach to a tall Douglas Fir, where the crows and the gull's mate circled, screaming and diving furiously.

The wounded gull, exhausted, paddling weakly, drifted in with the surf. It rolled onto the beach. After a few minutes, it stretched its wings; they still worked.

Humans, as omnivores, can be of two minds, watching such an attack: we hope the gull will escape, but we still hope the eagle will get a meal for its young. As sympathetic primates, we may want to help the gull. I'd picked up a drifting, dazed scoter a few months before and left it resting under a log until it could stagger back to the surf.

The gull was in the best place for it to be -- on the beach itself, so it could roll back into the surf against another attack. A well-intended urge to put it into the underbrush would have made it vulnerable to foxes, coyotes and feral cats. Being grabbed by a giant two-legged predator - no matter how benign the intent -- would have been a severe, possibly fatal shock.

Last we saw of the gull, it was still resting on the beach, head up, alert. If it had been bleeding in the water, the flow had stopped. The boney structure of the bird's back probably kept the talons out of its innards. If it needed protein to recover, the pebbles of the beach are full of the inch-long crustaceans called beach fleas, a favorite avian snack.

The next day, the gull was gone. The male in the resident pair of eagles, circling overhead, had lost some wing feathers.

The day after, where the gull had been, lay three wing-feathers, bound at their quills by dried flesh and tissue, and a clean-picked dessicated keel bone. The eagle may have finally gotten the gull, or it could have been the crows or the other gulls.

In the wild, food is food. You're either healthy, or eaten. Nobody suffers for long.

(Note: Herman, the only stock dove up here, a resident and honorary crow for three years, probably got picked off by a goshawk who went through last week. His people held a wake.)