Eagle Feeding

A sea eagle swooping past a brown eagle.

Some eagles feeding while more circle.

 
During a tour of the mangrove forest, your tour may enter a small cove set aside for eagle feeding. This is a particularly interesting feature of mangrove forest tours, and its worth checking to see if the tour you're booking will include it.

The feeding starts with the boat circling the cove while revving its engine. This apparently translates to a dinner bell for the eagles, who associate boat engines with fishermen, who often discard small fish caught in their nets, which the eagles easily catch.

The eagles swoop down to collect the food left out for them.

An eagle perched in the mangrove trees.

Once the eagles start circling, our guide began tossing chicken entrails on to the water. After the boat had moved off a little, the circling eagles began swooping down across the water to grab up the food. At one point, it appeared that there were at least 20 eagles circling and feeding.

Eventually, some larger sea eagles moved in on the action and joined the competition for what was left. The eagles continued feeding until all the chicken pieces were gone from the surface of the cove.

As we left the cove, we could see some eagles perched in the mangrove trees and got a couple of good pictures of them.