At first, Francis Ari Sture thought a human was trying to shove him down the steep Norwegian mountainside. Then he saw the golden eagle land.
“We are staring at each other for, maybe, a whole minute,” Sture said on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.”
The bird then attacked Sture five more times on Thursday last week, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain.
Photo: Francis Ari Sture / UGC via AP
The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway over the past week, including an assault on a toddler on Saturday that required the child to get stitches.
The golden eagle — common in Norway and the Scandinavian nation’s second-largest bird of prey, with a wingspan of about 2m — typically eats smaller animals, as well as foxes and sheep.
The toddler and the bird’s other victims needed stitches and medication for deep gouges. The bird was killed after the attack on the small child.
Photo: Francis Ari Sture / UGC via AP
The golden eagle “likely had a behavioral disorder” that prompted the aggression, Alv Ottar Folkestad, an eagle expert with BirdLife Norge, said on Monday.
What happened is “radically different from normal,” Folkestad said, adding that the attacks were likely all by a female eagle born this year.
“Details in the plumage make me believe it is the same bird. The plumage means that no two golden eagles are alike,” he said, adding that in the past days there were “favorable weather conditions” with high-altitude winds for the eagle to fly long distances over southern Norway.
In the most recent attack, a 20-month-old girl was playing outside a farm in Orkland, a small municipality in the south, on Saturday when the eagle came “out of the blue” and clawed her.
The girl’s father, who was not there during the attack, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the mother and a neighbor raced to fight the eagle.
The raptor attacked three times before it was killed when hit with a piece of wood, Folkestad said.
The father said his daughter got a couple of stitches and has scratch marks on her face. The VG newspaper said that one of wounds was just under one of the girl’s eyes. She and her mother are doing fine.
Neither the toddler nor the family were identified and they have asked not to be contacted, NRK said.
Police said they were aware of the attack, but have no detailed knowledge of the incident, saying a gamekeeper had been contacted.
In addition to Sture and the toddler, two other people have reported being attacked. One caught the incident on camera, while the other described a crushing weight as the bird swooped on her.
Mariann Myrvang, who was attacked on Wednesday last week, told NRK she cried out for help when “something big and heavy landed on my shoulders.”
“I went down on my knees, because I couldn’t stand up,” she said.
Armed with a branch, her husband chased the eagle away.
The claws went deep into Mariann Myrvang’s flesh, and she later received penicillin and a tetanus shot at hospital.
Sture, the following day, tried using his backpack as a shield. He also kept pushing the bird down to his feet so he could kick it away from him, but no matter what he did, the eagle kept coming back.
Rushing down 50m of steep terrain covered in loose rocks, he panicked he would slip, but falling unconscious was his biggest fear because the eagle potentially “would start to eat me.”
The eagle finally flew away, but Sture still had a two-hour hike to get to a campsite. He had not packed a satellite phone, and mobile phone service was spotty. He was able to call his father and the closest hospital sent a taxi to pick him up.
He arrived covered in blood and exhausted, with a gouge just centimeters from his left eye that he captured in a selfie before leaving the mountain. The doctors credited his sunglasses and a long-sleeved shirt with saving him from worse injuries.
After he received a tetanus shot, his brother drove him six hours home.
Despite his ordeal, he plans to keep hiking.
“I may be a bit more paranoid, may be looking up more a bit, but I’m definitely going back hiking. Maybe not that summit for a while,” Sture said.
LANDMARK CASE: ‘Every night we were dragged to US soldiers and sexually abused. Every week we were forced to undergo venereal disease tests,’ a victim said More than 100 South Korean women who were forced to work as prostitutes for US soldiers stationed in the country have filed a landmark lawsuit accusing Washington of abuse, their lawyers said yesterday. Historians and activists say tens of thousands of South Korean women worked for state-sanctioned brothels from the 1950s to 1980s, serving US troops stationed in country to protect the South from North Korea. In 2022, South Korea’s top court ruled that the government had illegally “established, managed and operated” such brothels for the US military, ordering it to pay about 120 plaintiffs compensation. Last week, 117 victims
China on Monday announced its first ever sanctions against an individual Japanese lawmaker, targeting China-born Hei Seki for “spreading fallacies” on issues such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and disputed islands, prompting a protest from Tokyo. Beijing has an ongoing spat with Tokyo over islands in the East China Sea claimed by both countries, and considers foreign criticism on sensitive political topics to be acts of interference. Seki, a naturalised Japanese citizen, “spread false information, colluded with Japanese anti-China forces, and wantonly attacked and smeared China”, foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian told reporters on Monday. “For his own selfish interests, (Seki)
Argentine President Javier Milei on Sunday vowed to “accelerate” his libertarian reforms after a crushing defeat in Buenos Aires provincial elections. The 54-year-old economist has slashed public spending, dismissed tens of thousands of public employees and led a major deregulation drive since taking office in December 2023. He acknowledged his party’s “clear defeat” by the center-left Peronist movement in the elections to the legislature of Buenos Aires province, the country’s economic powerhouse. A deflated-sounding Milei admitted to unspecified “mistakes” which he vowed to “correct,” but said he would not be swayed “one millimeter” from his reform agenda. “We will deepen and accelerate it,” he
‘HYANGDO’: A South Korean lawmaker said there was no credible evidence to support rumors that Kim Jong-un has a son with a disability or who is studying abroad South Korea’s spy agency yesterday said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who last week accompanied him on a high-profile visit to Beijing, is understood to be his recognized successor. The teenager drew global attention when she made her first official overseas trip with her father, as he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have long seen her as Kim’s likely successor, although some have suggested she has an older brother who is being secretly groomed as the next leader. The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) “assesses that she [Kim Ju-ae]
RSS