COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — 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 told The Associated Press on Monday. “I’m trying to think what’s in its mind.”
The bird then attacked Sture five more times Thursday, scratching and clawing the 31-year-old bicycle courier’s face and arms over 10 to 15 minutes as he sprinted down the mountain. The same eagle is believed to be responsible for attacks on three other people across a vast mountainous area of southern Norway over the last week, including an assault on a toddler Saturday that required the child to get stitches.
The golden eagle — common in Norway and the Scandinavian country’s second-largest bird of prey, with a wingspan of about 2 meters (6.5 feet) — 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.
The golden eagle “likely had a behavioral disorder” that prompted the aggression, Alv Ottar Folkestad, an eagle expert with BirdLife Norge, told the AP 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,