Repost Sunday: Oh, What A Sight...The Eagle Has Indeed Landed

I rerun some of my older posts on Sundays as a way to highlight stories that you may have missed. Just think of it as 'thought recycling' and a day off, or that I am incredibly, incredibly lazy.

There are certain things that you never, ever forget seeing. These things include the birth of your children, the first crotch hit you witnessed on America’s Funniest Home Videos and the sight of a nurse accidentally shaving part of your nipple off before a medical procedure. I can now add the following Associated Press headline to my list of unforgettable sights. It read simply, eagle lugging a deer head causes outage. Maybe that’s just what I get for cruising odd news stories in the hope of picking up a cheap story idea.

If you have the least bit of a good visual imagination, this seems like quite a sight. The story says that it is believed the eagle found the deer head in a landfill and tried to fly away with it. Now I have been fishing on the lake and have seen an eagle or other type of bird try to carry away a trout, but never a deer head. Oh yeah, how did a deer head end up in a landfill, even if this was in Alaska? Maybe it’s a common occurrence where you live, but here in the suburbs of Southern California (which have pretty much become metro areas), finding the heads of large animals in the local dump smacks of mob involvement. I suppose it could have been a mounted and stuffed dear head that some recently married ex-bachelor’s wife demanded he get rid of (or threw out while he wasn’t at home to stop her). If that’s the case, there is some guy decorating his garage or game room shaking his head in disappoint at the waste of this crucial piece of male room décor.

I have to mention that while thinking about all of this, I just can't stop singing. I’m gonna fly like an eagle, let his talons carry me, I’m gonna fly like an eagle and stop electricity…

It seems the eagle bit off more than he could chew and couldn’t get himself high enough to clear the power lines. Yes, I’m assuming this bird was a male because I just know that female eagles would be too smart to try this. In fact, I bet that while all the male eagles were rooting their fellow eagle on, all the female eagles were shaking their heads at the bird’s stupidity. It must’ve looked like a Boeing 747 trying to take off. You just never think it’s going to get up enough speed or altitude to clear the runway. Unfortunately, the eagle didn’t survive the collision. It’s probably a safe bet to assume that the deer head wasn’t found in a mountable condition either.

As hard as I try to deny the thought, I can’t help but think that there is a children’s parable somewhere in this story. It involves the greedy bird that is so confident in his strength that he ignores those around him and thinks he can fly the deer head to his nest to enjoy it all by himself without sharing. Had he listened to the other eagles that tried to talk sense into him, he wouldn’t have struck the power lines, which of course metaphorically represents his own ego. See, he was struck down by his own ego. ‘Shocking,’ isn’t it? Now, how to handle the illustrations for this soon to be children’s classic?

In the end, it looks like birds on a wire tend to catch fire…