I’ve seen this video literally everywhere this morning (literally), so I figured it might as well be on FilmDrunk. Basically, a golden eagle, a bird which has been known to snatch Blackberries in Sandra Bullock movies, tried to snatch a kid from a playground in Montreal, and some Frenchy recorded it (barely). Apparently this kind of thing is not that rare. Which is why, when I get rich, I’m buying on of these things for each shoulder. Then I’ll use them to steal unwanted children. I call it “A Modest The Proposal.”

This sort of thing actually happens from time to time in the eagle’s habitat. About a decade ago, a bald eagle with an intimidating six-foot wingspan terrorized the beaches of New Hampshire, injuring two adults and one baby. It’s hardly a new phenomenon, too. Way back in 1868, an eagle successfully stole a small boy from a yard in Tennessee and carried it two miles before a hunter’s shots scared the eagle into dropping the child, “a fine, healthy, rosy boy, with torn clothes, but otherwise uninjured.” Mountain goats tend not to be so lucky. [TheAtlantic]

Yeah, that Gandalf can be a real dick sometimes.

UPDATE: Okay, other people are saying that it’s a fake. Or at least, staged. This is what I get for trying to post before I have coffee. From the Black Swamp Bird Observatory, via I09:

A golden eagle tries to snatch a baby in Montreal,” and the video goes viral. But it’s faked. Golden Eagle is a scarce visitor in the Montreal area, but the bird in the video is not a Golden Eagle, nor anything else that occurs in the wild in North America. This was clearly a setup: using a falconer’s bird, and probably a fake toddler for the distant scene. With all the ignorance about nature that’s out there already, the last thing we need is this kind of stupid garbage.

I don’t know whether to take that at face value, or how damning an accusation that is, and frankly, I’ve spent enough time reading arguments and counter-arguments about a 30-second YouTube video. If you ask me, it was probably just viral marketing for CBS’s new show, So You Think You Can Falcon.

I honestly don’t know what I was supposed to be seeing there. But, here’s a way better video of a golden eagle dragging goats off a cliff. At the very least, the original video gave us this. WAR EAGLE!

[Thanks, Charlie]