Eagle Takes World on Tour of London and Paris

Image via YouTube

Unless you have ever ridden an eagle, and we presume that’s none of you, you have never seen London or Paris from this glorious vantage.

Mashable’s Tim Chester spotted the latest videos from Freedom, “a joint project between the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and French falconer Jacques Olivier.”

The collaborative effort spawned a delightful YouTube page that, among other things, features an eagle flying over iconic locales.

The latest shows off a familiar landscape with London’s Tower Bridge looming in the distance. In one short jaunt, we find out what it’s like taking a piggyback ride on an eagle:

Yay, we feel like hobbits riding Middle-Earth eagles.

In October, Metro’s Harry Readhead reported on the large bird taking a brief stroll throughout Paris, which you can also enjoy below:

There is also this drop over London:

And apropos of little, here is Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like and Eagle:

Of course, this is about far more than delighting people viewing these videos at home. It’s about conservation and awareness. In fact, the video that took place in France came with quite the startling context.

Readhead writes that Olivier is hoping to bring the white-tail eagle back into France and the Swiss Alps. Unfortunately, this particular eagle “has been extinct in France for more than half a century.”

Thanks to social media and video technology, the world gets to enjoy the flight of this clever eagle. The only real negative is that we simply need more, because getting a taste of Paris and London has us craving the sight of other big cities from an eagle-eye view that is truly spectacular.

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