VIDEO: Vicious Hawk & Eagle Attacks on Cats & Kittens

The video below shows several brutal hawk and eagle attacks on cats and kittens.

Eagles and haws are both ferocious flying predators and mortal enemies.

Well, mortal enemies might be a slight exaggeration, but they clearly don’t like each other and they don’t get along.

They are both predatory birds and they each want their space and supremacy.

According to Wikipedia, taken literally, the term bird of prey has a wide meaning that includes many birds that hunt and feed on animals and also birds that eat very small insects. In ornithology, the definition for “bird of prey” has a narrower meaning: birds that have very good eyesight for finding food, strong feet for holding food, and a strong curved beak for tearing flesh.

Most birds of prey also have strong curved talons for catching or killing prey. An example of this difference in definition, the narrower definition excludes storks and gulls, which can eat quite large fish, partly because these birds catch and kill prey entirely with their beaks, and similarly bird-eating skuas, fish-eating penguins, and vertebrate-eating kookaburras are excluded.

Birds of prey generally prey on vertebrates, which are usually quite large relative to the size of the bird. Most also eat carrion, at least occasionally, and vultures and condors eat carrion as their main food source.

An obliged point of transit of the migration of the birds of prey is the bottleneck-shaped Strait of Messina, Sicily, here seen from Dinnammare mount, Peloritani.

The earliest event occurred nearly 14 to 12 million years ago. This result seems to be one of the oldest dates published so far in the case of birds of prey. For example, a previous reconstruction of migratory behaviour in one Buteo clade with a result of the origin of migration around 5 million years ago was also supported by that study.

Migratory species of raptors had a southern origin because it seems that all of the major lineages within Accipitridae had an origin to one of the biogeographic realms of the Southern Hemisphere.

The appearance of migratory behaviour occurred in the tropics parallel with the range expansion of migratory species to temperate habitats. Similar results of southern origin in other taxonomic groups can be found in the literature.

Distribution and biogeographic history highly determine the origin of migration in birds of prey. Based on some comparative analyses, diet breadth also has an effect on the evolution of migratory behaviour in this group, but its relevance needs further investigation. The evolution of migration in animals seems to be a complex and difficult topic with many unanswered questions.

A recent study discovered new connections between migration and the ecology, life history of raptors.

A brief overview from abstract of the publish paper shows that “clutch size and hunting strategies have been proved to be the most important variables in shaping distribution areas, and also the geographic dissimilarities may mask important relationships between life history traits and migratory behaviours.

The West Palearctic-Afrotropical and the North-South American migratory systems are fundamentally different from the East Palearctic-Indomalayan system, owing to the presence versus absence of ecological barriers.” Maximum entropy modelling can help in answering the question: why species winters at one location while the others are elswhere.