A recent video out of Canada shows just how hard a bear is willing to work for some fresh eagle meat. The video, which was recorded by a group of anglers on a lake in northern Saskatchewan, shows a black bear scaling a tree to raid a bald eagle’s nest.
@adamjhudec The full real video of this bear taking on an eagles nest!! Cant believe I got to see this in person while fishing in northern Saskatchewan!
♬ original sound – Adam J Hudec
The video was shared to TikTok by Adam J Hudec. It’s already received over 2 million views along with thousands of comments since it was shared earlier this month.
Hudec captured the footage on his cellphone while sharing a boat with a couple fishing buddies on Saskatchewan’s Cigar Lake. It shows a black bear climbing a large conifer on the lakeshore. There’s a large eagle’s nest at the top of the tree, and it’s clear from the start that the bear has its eye on the eaglet perched in the nest. As the bear climbs, it is attacked repeatedly by the two parent eagles trying to protect their young.
“I can’t believe I got to see this in person,” Hudec wrote on the social media post.
The black bear continues to work its way up the tree, unfazed by the two adult eagles that keep dive-bombing and swiping at it from above. After taking a short breather at the top of the tree, the bear chomps down on the fledgling eagle and pulls the bird from the nest before climbing back down.
“And that’s a job well done,” Hudec says at the end of the video.
Several commenters agreed with Hudec, pointing out how far the bear was willing to go to reach the eagle’s nest. Although the bear made the task look easy, climbing a tree while two massive raptors take swipes from above is no walk in the park.
“The bear earned that meal, as horrible as it sounds,” said one of the commenters.
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“If it makes anyone feel better, these eagles eat other animals’ babies every day,” another quipped.
Black bears are known as opportunistic feeders, which is a fancy way of saying they will eat almost anything they can get their paws on. Although they commonly eat plant material, there have been other recorded instances of black bears raiding eagle nests in Alaska, climbing trees to feed on bird feeders, and even scaling powerlines to reach raven’s nests.
To top off the crew’s once-in-a-lifetime experience, they also managed to catch some fish, including a 39-inch lake trout they boated later that afternoon. Not a bad day on the water, eh?