Status
Vulnerable
Habitat
Lowland tropical rainforest canopy
Range
Amazon
Group
Birds
Talons the size of a grizzly's claws, in a bird that flies through trees.
Short broad wings and a long tail make it manoeuvrable in dense forest, where a longer-winged eagle would be useless. It hunts by ambush between branches rather than by soaring.
A pair raises a single chick roughly every two to three years. That reproductive rate makes the species extremely slow to recover from forest loss — the limiting factor is not the bird, it is the tree.
Frames in the archive
Full gallery
Thirteen Centimetres
Canopy tower, Rio Negro, first light.
