The fur was really flying.
A North Carolina driver had the ride of her life when a cat came crashing through her front windshield on the highway — after it was dropped by a bald eagle overhead.
Melissa Schlarb, the 28-year-old motorist, was driving to work around 8 a.m. Wednesday along US Route 74 near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park when the kitty corpse blasted through her vehicle.
“You may not believe me, but I just had a bald eagle drop a cat through my windshield,” she told the 911 dispatcher. “It absolutely shattered my windshield.”
The dispatcher, to her credit, calmly responded, “OK. I do believe you, honestly,” then laughed.
Schlarb said she first spotted America’s national bird in the sky on her morning commute.
“I drive that road every single morning,” Schlarb told WHAM 13 News. “But this time, I did see the bald eagle coming from a distance, and I’m not used to seeing them there, and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’”
As she stared in awe, Schlarb realized that the eagle had something clenched in its talons. Soon, the cat corpse was falling from the sky and headed right for her — like a speeding bullet with nine lives.
“I could see the cat in my passenger seat,” she said of the impact. “I have guts all over me; there’s glass everywhere. It sounded like a bomb went off. Of course, at that moment, I just slam on my brakes.”
Schlarb was directed off the road by two other drivers, where she called 911.
Through laughter, the dispatcher had one follow-up question: “Is the cat still alive?”
Schlarb noted that it wasn’t, and at that point had moved the cat from her car to the side of the road.
After the terrifying affair, Schlarb said she was “definitely going to keep a closer eye” on her own kitty.
It’s unclear whether the doomed feline was alive when it crashed through Schlarb’s car — though one wildlife expert said it may have been roadkill scavaged by the bald eagle.
“But they can take animals the size of a cat,” said Kendrick Weeks, Western Wildlife Diversity Program supervisor for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.
“It is much harder for them to take a live cat than a dead cat. They usually don’t prey on something they don’t find palatable. And, scavenging is a common behavior in bald eagles.”
With Post wires
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