On Monday, October 19, 2015 at 4:06:50 PM UTC-6, Mike the Strike wrote:
On Monday, October 19, 2015 at 9:34:40 AM UTC-7, SF wrote:
I have personally observed buzzards circling in sink. It usually occurs at inopportune times for me, and I think they do it just to mess with me. So right after the never follow a glider with an engine rule, is the never fully trust a buzzard rule. No personal experience with vultures, and their thermal choices.

I have some concerns about this study. It looks like they limited their "recruitment" to only one type of bird. Well that looks like discrimination to me. Were these birds given adequate compensation for their work? Were they offered medical care, vacation, medical leave? What happens if they get hurt while working? Not to mention retirement benefits.

Obviously these birds need to unionize, and until that happens the justice department needs to step in and supervise things so the rest of us can sleep well at night knowing that the lawyers are taking care of this for us..

SF

If by "buzzard" you are referring to the turkey vulture, they hunt in a different way from most other vultures. They usually fly very low and hunt mainly by sense of smell. They have huge wings, a low wing loading, and soar on microlift near the surface. They are almost always useless to soaring pilots!

Many other vultures, including the black vulture that we have here in Arizona, hunt by thermalling high enough to use visual clues. The Cape Vulture, which I met in my early gliding career in South Africa, is the only one I've experienced that seemed comfortable soaring with gliders. These have higher wing loading and need to thermal!

Mike

The turkey vultures have been migrating overhead (Greeley, CO). They seem a little less organized this year. There's a colony that stays in the Colorado foothills NW of Fort Collins in the summer, presumably going to Texas for the winter. We also have some good soaring gaggles of pelicans that reside here in the summer. I think they've already gone south. The biggest soaring gaggles I've ever seen were 1500-3000 white storks. We had a plague of green frogs at Incirlik AB in 1985 or 1986. You couldn't walk anywhere without stepping on them. One day, nearly 3000 storks arrived locally and started feasting on the frogs, a feast that lasted a few weeks. The storks would take to the air on the first morning thermals. There was one F-16 canopy lost to a stork strike. There may be about 6200 nesting pairs around the eastern Med. They can only fly about 30 miles by flapping their wings, but can soar long distances.