A Bald Eagle regularly sits atop a pine tree in my backyard about 150 feet from the water's edge (on the Puget Sound). Just stares at the water. ....hunting. His prety moves under the water, sometimes hundreds of feet offshore. I'm sittin' there with high-power binoculars unable to see a thing out there, but that great bird spots his prey every time, and swoops down out of the sky for the kill, emerging with fresh fish. Unfathomable vision.
Mr. Mojo, I'm near a tidal river in Maine, and we have heaps of Baldies, even a Golden here and there. Probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen was a Baldy figuring out how to get part off a deer carcass airborne. the river was frozen solid, with huge upright slabs of Ice along the shores, heaved up by the tidal action, but the center was glassy and flat.
Game Wardens had thrown a roadkill doe out onto the ice, I estimated that the doe would dress out to around 110 or more. Evidently this Baldy or other critters had been working the carcass for a while before we got there
The Baldy was working it over hard, concentrating on the area just fore of the hindquarters. I assumed he was just going for sweet meats.
I didn't know it at the time but the Baldy was working a plan. After about 10 or 15 minutes of this. He took a hop and circled, then hit it from a different angle in the same spot. With lots of strenuous looking bites and turns.
What he had done was sever the area between the last vertebrae and the pelvic area. He now had two sections.
He took the head and the trunk (sans front-quarters)which was striped down to straps and a stem of spine. It couldn't have weighed much but it sure looked like a lot of deer to me.
The Baldy sat on the head, got a good grip, then with a hopping and flapping motion he wrestled the deer over to the smooth part of the ice, towards the glassy center and he started flapping, -the carcass started sliding across the ice.
I was with a friend, we both said: "No way"...
He flapped, gained speed, it took way more than 200 yards, but he started to turn into the wind at a wide bend and he got airborne, made it over the treeline and out of site.
Common knowledge is that they can lift about half their bodyweight. I would have estimated the piece of carcass to be 10 Lbs or more, -but I know the bird wasn't more than 15 Lbs, so say it was 7 Lbs of carcass. It was still an awesome sight.
I wonder if the factoid about how much a Baldy can carry in flight does not take into account the scenario of an icy-river with just the right winds.
Try it in the UV, and report back your results...