African black eagle

The African black eagle, known as the Verreaux,s eagle is one of the larger raptors measuring up to 96 cm from the bill to the tip of the tail. I took this photo in the Drakensberg mountains and it was fascinating to watch this bird fly into a thermal and glide up to about 5000 ft above the ground. These birds have the ability to see heat  rising from the ground and ride these thermal pockets hardly flapping their wings and circling up to amazing heights. As the hot air pocket rises high above the earth they simply circle and rise up with the warm air, it would be too exhausting for a bird this size to be able to flap its wings up to that kind of altitude, many birds use this method to fly thousands of kilometers gliding from one thermal to the next.  

The black eagle in this photo was born and raised in captivity and special permission was granted to remove his egg from the  nest by a team who had to ab sail down the mountain to retrieve it. The interesting thing is that the first baby to hatch from the egg will kill and eat the second baby that is hatched. The egg in this case had been removed from the nest and hatched from an incubator to save its life. When they are born they have no identity and use imprinting to establish their own identity, so if a human feeds them and rears them they thing they are human. A mirror was used in a closed environment so that this bird was able to see himself and correctly identify with himself as once they have already imprinted the process cannot be undone.  

This is very important so that the bird is able to identify with a mate and survive in the wild.