I have caught this with a short shutter speed intentinaly, the exif will show you that I used the aperture priority and in that context I choosed a diapragm that made the camera shoot with good sharpness and not too high speed. The goal was to get this motion feeling in the shot and also getting a good DOF on the background.
Modifying now some sectors of the shot in a way to get a false or, like you say, better image or view is something one could talk about but that I will certainly not do. An eagle that flyes at this level from a free fall at high altitude has allmost a speed of more then 100 mph and this is not easy to catch and get sharp anyway.
