Yeah, fighting an eagle could be iffy. The size of that thing? Birdy refuses to say cheese and he ain't fuckin' around.
I was riding my bike one day, just starting out from the trailhead. Pond on my right, some bushes an my left, straight, flat, dirt road in front. A friend was maybe 15 feet ahead of me. We were heading out to a hill to find some reported Native American grinding holes here and there, and a few other signs of their earlier presence. The back side of the hill is off limits and known for raptors.
Apparently my friend woke up something sleeping off to the left, and as I was going by it came boiling out of the bushes. Huge, black, 2-3 feet in front of me, it pretty much took up my full field of vision. My initial reaction was it's a turkey, what else around here is huge, black, and flies. Three flaps of the wings and it was pretty high over the pond.
Not a turkey, but I didn't know what it was. Later we get to the top of the hill and look out, we see peregrine falcons and these same black things. They looked like eagles, the silhouette, the distinct shape of the beak. I know we supposedly have bald eagles around here, like one or two once in awhile at some remote lake, but this wasn't a bald eagle. I'd heard of golden eagles, but this thing was very dark brown.
I found it on google, turns out golden eagles aren't golden at all, they're dark brown, just like the one in the above image. And big.
