Believing what you see

I won't post it because I suspect it's a viral video advertisement and they don't need my help, but there's a very convincing video out there of a large bird of prey swooping down and lifting a toddler a few feet before dropping it. It blew up on my twitter page last night around midnight, with people from disparate sources suddenly talking about it at once. That to me is the biggest evidence that it is part of a marketing campaign and not a real event. If it's real it will be picked up by legitimate journalists, and it will be kind of a big story. But I don't think it is.

Edit: we seem to have identified our hoaxers. I'm pleased that it was a not-for-profit operation.

3:00 snapshot #1149

Jim stands on the rim of the fire pit waiting for Alex to throw the stick.

Eagle hoax part two

So, @TweetsOfOld just posted this link. The highlighted news story, from a 1906 Kentucky newspaper, reads in its entirety: "A four-year-old boy was playing in front of his parents hut at Varallo, Italy, when an eagle suddenly swooped down and carried him off. The eagle was seen to alight on the summit of a high mountain some miles away with his burden safely in his beak. No trace of boy or eagle has been discovered since, although fully 100 mountanineers (sic) spent three weeks continuously searching on the mountains."

This story was either made up completely by the newspaper, a la the Weekly World News, or was spun by the grieving but guilty parents of a child whose death was caused by negligence or malice. The tiniest four year old could not be lifted by the most powerful of european eagles (the golden, again), and eagles don't carry large prey animals with their relatively weak mouths.

Once I asked an ornithologist, "besides mute swans, what flying birds could possibly kill a human being?" She thought for a moment and said "a harpy eagle could kill a small human." Harpy eagles prey on monkeys and sloths, so a four year old is in the right size range for that. They don't pluck the animals from the trees and fly away with them to eat them in their aerie like a roc, however. (oh, wait, yes they do.)

The eagle snatches child video was all too reminiscent of the eagle snatches dog urban legend--another clue to it's doubtfulness.

I don't want to come off as smug--I was totally taken by the eagle video at first. The student filmmakers did a good job of shaking the camera in horror, animating a plausible-appearing grab by the bird, and so on. What this really makes me think about is how valuable it is to actually experience something first hand. Technology can make anything look real--you can synthesize a virtual dragon, dinosaur, faerie, troll, god, alien, or trip to the sun. Why should a child who can watch a perfect artificial dragon bother going to a zoo (for example) to see an anteater or (perish forbid) out into the wilderness to see a moose?

3:00 snapshot #1150

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