This morning on Google+, I shared a charming video of an octopus stealing a diver’s camera with the comment, “This never happens to birdwatchers!” Apparently I spoke too soon. Lars Fosdal replied with a June 2011 video of a gull in Cannes stealing a camera and flying away with it. Think either video is staged?
Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds in 2003, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.
I believe I read an account of the gull-steals-camera video that said it was indeed “staged”, in the sense that they were trying to film exactly the events that transpired (for a commercial, I seem to recall? or something like that…) But they got some help from the gull, and in fact it worked better than they’d hoped.