Playing Chicken With The Birds

On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 15:54:37 -0800, Mike the Strike wrote:

My earlier experience with Cape Vultures in South Africa was quite
different - I remember very well when one joined me in a thermal and sat
right off my wing as I circled. I seem to remember them circling in
unison, more like sailplanes.

That sounds very similar behaviour to what I remember of Indian vultures
back in the late '70s[1]. One day in particular stands out: we were in a
hotel in Jaipur. This turned out to be about 1km from the local abattoir
and there was a nearly stationary thermal between us and it. One
afternoon I looked up and saw many hundreds of vultures streaming up from
their feast and slotting into the thermal's base and riding it to maybe
2000ft before streaming off across the city and into another standing
thermal over there. The vultures were very orderly, with few if any
turning the wrong way: it was like staring up into a giant cylinder while
it slowly spun anti-clockwise on its axis. I took a photo as the last 150
vultures were still climbing and it chimes with my memory: only two or
three mavericks can be picked out bucking the traffic.

[1] You don't see that sort of sight now because Indian vultures have
been largely wiped out by Diclophenac. This gets slathered on farmer's
water buffaloes to relieve muscle pain. When the buffs died the feasting
vultures got poisoned. There always used to be a few kites thermalling
with the vultures but unusually there were few, if any, in that Jaipur
boomer. I expected to see some surviving vultures when I was in India for
a month in 2016, but saw fewer than five in the whole time I was there,
where used to be countable thousands. Brown kites seem to have taken over
their role: there are many more now than I remember seeing back in the
day. They mark the thermals now and are the prime avian scavengers. In
partial compensation, brown kites are more agile and skilful fliers than
Indian vultures.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 at 8:11:35 PM UTC-5, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 15:54:37 -0800, Mike the Strike wrote:

That sounds very similar behaviour to what I remember of Indian vultures
back in the late '70s[1]. One day in particular stands out: we were in a
hotel in Jaipur. This turned out to be about 1km from the local abattoir
and there was a nearly stationary thermal between us and it. One
afternoon I looked up and saw many hundreds of vultures streaming up from
their feast and slotting into the thermal's base and riding it to maybe
2000ft before streaming off across the city and into another standing
thermal over there. The vultures were very orderly, with few if any
turning the wrong way: it was like staring up into a giant cylinder while
it slowly spun anti-clockwise on its axis.

The buzzards I'm talking about are black, and appear to fit the description of the black vulture, which are definitely native to Florida:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_vulture

These are soaring birds with great eyesight, but not a great sense of smell like the turkey vulture.

Their soaring behavior sounds a lot like the Indian vulture that Martin talks about above.

In Nepal a hang glider operator uses vultures to locate thermals:

http://www.parahawking.com/index.php/about