Chimp steals eagle's dinner in surreal forest contronation

Nobody likes having their food stolen when they’re just about to tuck into dinner – but it’s even more tragic when you’ve hunted it yourself.

For an eagle in western Tanzania, this was very much the case, after an alpha male chimpanzee was spotted rudely interrupting its meal before making off with its prey.

The incident was recorded on 31 October in the journal Primates, and describes “a confrontational scavenging interaction between an adult male chimpanzee from the Issa Valley and a crowned eagle”.

The clash resulted in the chimpanzee “capturing and consuming the carcass of a juvenile bushbuck”.

Chimpanzees are omnivorous, meaning they’ll pretty much eat anything. Meat only makes up about two percent of their diet, according to Project Chimps.

Usually, they spend their time looking for fruits, but they also chow down on roots, nuts, leaves, plants, flowers, insects and more.

They are “well known for their vertebrate and invertebrate hunting, but they rarely scavenge”, the study said.

So you can imagine lead author Sam Baker’s surprise when he saw the chimp flagrantly stealing the eagle’s meal.

In an interview with Live Science, he said: “Like most new, particularly rare experiences, it was surreal and exhilarating in the moment.

“These confrontations are rare in the literature, most of which are inferred, so an almost complete observation of events is unique.”

Baker is research coordinator of the Bugoma Primate Conservation Project in Uganda, and was following the chimp, called Imba, with Raulent Mfaume, a local field assistant, when they saw the incident.

It is only the second documented example of a chimpanzee stealing food from a raptor – most accounts of scavenging of this sort involve chimps taking prey from baboons.

He said other chimps then tried to steal the carcass and tried to persuade Imba to share for about an hour afterwards. Imba gave some to a female chimp and consumed most of the bushbuck himself.

After discarding the carcass, other chimps then went and helped themselves to the remains until eventually, only the skull was left.

Yum.

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