This hawk has a very dark sense of humour. As a family cook their BBQ they marvel at the bird as it circles nearby then swoops on its unsuspecting, slithering prey.
But rather than carry the tiger snake off for a feed, the cheeky feathered devil makes a pass to chuck the snake smack bang in to the middle of the family luncheon. So much for the serenity.
Scary, but totally hilarious!
This video has clocked up close to a quarter million views since being published earlier this week. Media outlets across Australia, including SBS and Fairfax Media, have re-posted it and published it to their sites, often without questioning the clip’s legitimacy.
Only in Australia, right? Well, not so fast. In this day and age of clickbait ‘amazing videos’ if it’s too fantastic to be true, it probably isn’t.
So, is the ‘Hawk drops a snake’ video real or fake?
There’s a few things to consider about the video before posting this to your Facebook or main stream media news page:
1) It’s a bloody big snake. Can you see a snake on the ground before the bird drops in? Nope. It could just be hiding in the grass, sure, but the grass aint that long and the snake seems to just appear in the birds talons when it swoops down.
2) When the hawk (if that’s what it is; we call sea-eagle) grabs the snake it’s all in one smooth motion and the bird barely makes contact with the ground. Any fan of David Attenborough can tell you that when a bird of brey grabs something roughly equivalent to it’s own body weight, perhaps even heavier (it’s a big snake), there’s a pause while it grabs its morsel and then requires a bit more effort on the bird’s part to lift its victim skyward.
3) And this is the dead give away.. did you spot the seagull? Look carefully, its standing there on the left, with not a care in the world. Do you really think a seagull would just be chillin’ lakeside while fat snake slithers by and an apex preditor circles overhead? And would it really be so nonchelant as those two make contact just a meter away over its left shoulder. Nope.
4) The poster, a certain Mr Douglus Wong, apart from not being able to spell ‘Douglas’ correctly, has only this single video in his YouTube profile. Hmmm…
It’s not that an incident like this couldn’t occur in our beloved Australia, but we call FAKE.
What do you think?
Remember the recent ‘Man fights off great white shark in Sydney harbour’ and ‘Lightning almost strikes girl in Sydney (Oh my god honey)’ increadibly amazing, blow-your-mind viral videos? They were fakes; the creations of an Aussie company The Woolshed Co. This one smells a bit Wooly too.
