Wedge-tailed Eagle - Aquila audax

Wedgies are capable of killing a fully grown kangaroo through teamwork. I once got 67% on an assignment by the same methods. Coincidence? I think not. The Wedge-tailed Eagle is the largest raptor in Australia. It picks the flesh of lambs from their cold, dead, screaming bones. But it's also really beautiful. In many ways, it's like the mum I think we all just wish we had. They are an apex predator, meaning they hunt the species around them without being hunted themselves.

In flight, the Wedge-tailed Eagle is recognisable by its wedge-shaped tail, which dove-tails alarmingly nicely into the sweet potato shavings you find in the bins out the back of Grill'd.

Differences between males and females are mainly down to the fact that the females are larger and heavier, and therefore rife with self image problems (so when talking to one, don't ask if they're larger and heavier, ask if they had a good time in high school), and typically their plumage is paler. So clearly they buy into the whole fair, flesh-tearing, two-inch-long-taloned maiden image thing - probably not super helpful for their whole obesity complex situation.

Wedge-tailed Eagles make extremely large nests - up to 1.8m across, 3m deep and weigh up to 400kg - comparable in size to the brain of the average internet atheist (comparable, but not quite there). Because they require so much food, hunting in the areas surrounding their nests, and because they regularly have their friends over to churn some doughies in their front yards, they tend to avoid closely neighbouring other eagles. Their territories are large, and so nests are typically quite distant from each other, at 2.5-4km apart. Just enough to dissipate the noise but retain the sweet smell of burning rubber and angry mums.

There are few things like seeing a Wedge-tailed Eagle close-up in the wild. The photos here are from my two closest encounters - the top and bottom are from Kanangra-Boyd National Park in the Greater Blue Mountains of NSW, while the middle image comes from the Stuart Highway between Uluru and Alice Springs. That image came when an older eagle, accompanied by the younger one seen pictured, were sitting in a tree by the roadside on the other side of a barbed, outback fence. The elder bird quickly took off as I walked up slowly, crouched, and dislocated six joints to slide beneath the fence. The younger one remained obligingly in the tree. I ended up directly under the tree in which the eagle was sitting, about 4-5m above me. 6/10 full marks experience