I saw a man who was (apparently) killed by birds of prey although I didn’t see the actual attack. He was fairly drunk at the time though.
While the skull is significantly more difficult to break I know a woman who had one of her lower arm bones cracked by a Golden Eagle she had on her arm. She was giving a demonstration with it, it got excited by something and clamped down. The pressure was enough to crack the bone and put her in a wrist brace for a few weeks.
I’m still not sure what got me, I was just minding my own business, walking to my car, and WHAM!
As one who got hit in the head, I doubt it. While I got a big cut on my scalp, there was no bone damage, and the bird hit me hard enough to make me stagger. My first thought was that a branch from a tree had fallen on me.
Colibri the bird that hit me didn’t do much more than give me a whiplash-esque feeling in my neck. With the right angle? I guess maybe it could have broken my neck, but I don’t know what that angle would be.
I’m talking specifically about a Harpy Eagle, weighing close to 20 pounds. Any hawk that might have hit you in Florida would probably have weighed less than 3 pounds, and wouldn’t have had anything like the impact of an eagle. Bald Eagles and Golden Eagles can get up to 14-15 pounds.
An object weighing 15-20 pounds that hit you directly in the head at 40 mph or more might very well have a chance of fracturing your skull or dislocating your neck. But an eagle would probably have to be trained to do this. While they may plunge straight down on prey, they probably would only try for a glancing blow on an animal as large as a human becuse of the risk of injury. Their objective normally is to get the attacker to leave the area of the nest, not to kill it.
A friend of mine went hawking once. He thought it was very cute the way the hawk nuzzled him, until it took a chunk of his beard - presumably as nesting material.
Weren’t there giant birds of prey on some of those islands humans colonized relatively late? Could one of those killed a person?
The moa of New Zealand comes to mind, but I do not think it is classified as a bird of prey. It was related to ostriches & rheas.
The largest known eagle was Haast’s Eagle, which lived in New Zealand and apparently preyed on moas. Weight is estimated at up to 13 or 14 kg, or close to 30 pounds. The website says they may have been able to kill moas up to 200 kg in weight, but this is speculative. Depending on its method of killing prey, it could well have been a threat to humans. They survived until after the arrival of the Maori in New Zealand,
The largest known raptorial bird was Argentavis magnificens from the Miocene of Argentina, with a weight estimated at up to 100 kg. It is debatable whether it was a scavenger or an active hunter.