birds

[Steve Davy]

Those that have access to internet video such as Netflix, I recommend the documentary titled "The Whale".
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Administrator note - 2015/12/23 12:00:00 UTC

Posts:
111 - birds topic
888 - Steve Davy

[Steve Davy]

Some holiday fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEjUAnPc2VA

[Tad Eareckson]

http://www.ushawks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2272
US Hawks - Sea to Shining Sea

Rick Masters - 2016/01/17 08:44:05 UTC

Years later, I mentioned this to Larry Tudor (or perhaps it was Jim Lee) and he told me about a hang glider pilot somewhere who had been attacked by an eagle.
The big bird had flown right up to his control bar and latched onto his arm with its huge talons and began tearing at him.
The pilot, terrified and in considerable agony, couldn't get the bird to let go.
In fear for his life, he resorted to beating the powerful yet fragile creature to death against his uprights while his glider dove out of control.
When he landed, the talons, even in death, were locked so tightly into the flesh of his arm, he had to cut them off with a knife to free himself.

Years later, I mentioned this to Larry Tudor (or perhaps it was Jim Lee)...

(Or perhaps it was Jim Lee.)

...and he told me about a hang glider pilot...

A hang glider pilot.

...somewhere...

Somewhere.

...who had been attacked by an eagle.

AN eagle. We don't get to hear anything about a species. Maybe this:

07-004211
http://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7379/13901468389_f3f11843d5_o.png


kind.

The big bird had flown right up to his control bar and latched onto his arm with its huge talons and began tearing at him.

So it was trying to kill him and eat him, huh? Not just trying to drive him out of its territory.

The pilot...

...whom, to this day, has never publicized an account of the story...

...terrified and in considerable agony, couldn't get the bird to let go.
In fear for his life, he resorted to beating the powerful yet fragile creature...

In my experience birds tend to be really surprisingly NOT fragile.

...to death against his uprights...

I REALLY doubt that there are any eagles stupid enough to allow themselves to be beaten to death while maintaining death grips on the adversary.

...while his glider dove out of control.

Hope he went upright and to the control tubes at the earliest opportunity to get it back under control as quickly and safely as possible.

When he landed, the talons, even in death, were locked so tightly into the flesh of his arm, he had to cut them off with a knife to free himself.

And yet this is the first we've ever heard about this. And we've never heard of a similar incident from anywhere - even from Australia where the Wedgies are notorious for attacking gliders and shredding sails.

I'm calling this horrible story total crap - and not just 'cause I want to believe it is. Reminds me a lot of the one about the guy who strapped the jato unit to the top of his car and lit it off out in the desert.

[Tad Eareckson]

As Brian definitely noticed and others undoubtedly did I was pretty down on posting from the end of last year through most of this so far. Left for Belize - mission birds and stuff - via Florida on the morning of 2015/12/29, arrived late (thanks a lot, Cuba) on the following day, reversed things on Monday morning, back home in pretty bad shape early Tuesday night.

Saw lotsa stuff I've known just about all my life but never dreamed I'd see in the wild - including a couple:
http://www.kitestrings.org/post6692.html#p6692
but they were only gray ghosts in the headlamps of the two guides we had running our canoes on the river.

The trip was a bit punishing and getting back through the international maze of Miami International onto proper US soil just about finished me off. When I got home my lower legs were so swollen I couldn't look at them until after several days of keeping them elevated.

One of the highlights... I knew that the chances of seeing a Jaguar for a bird tourist with less than a dozen days at his disposal would be about one in a billion so I set my goal as tracks. The only disappointment there was that they came ridiculously easily. Afternoon of 2016/01/06, Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary headquarters, a couple hundred yards out on the main trail towards Victoria Peak, very fresh tracks in mud, maybe just hours old. (Also got my head licked by one on Monday afternoon but that was cheating at the Belize Zoo.)

The encounters were too overwhelming to report on in something less than a book but I'm hoping to hit this thread periodically until I get things reasonably well covered.

[<BS>]

Nice kitty.

[Tad Eareckson]

I've had a pair of Leitz Trinovid 7x42 BA binoculars:



which have served me well since the beginning of time but a couple years ago I started thinking about the stabilized twelve powers a good friend had acquired maybe around fifteen years ago. Freakin' incredible.




Lists for two grand, got one off of eBay "used" - the box had been opened, not a fingerprint on anything - for half that.

Binoculars are tradeoffs. More power gets you closer but reduces the field width and exit pupil diameter (makes it harder to hit a target) and depth of field (puts stuff in front of and behind wherever you happen to be focused out of focus (with a camera you increase depth of field by stopping down the aperture but hafta compensate with longer shutter speeds to get the required light)). So the 7x42s increase the likelihood of hitting and identifying an evasive target but if you can acquire and focus with the tens and then hit the stabilizer button (bye-bye shake) it's often better than looking through a telescope on a tripod.

Also... While these particular 7x42s have awesome depth of field, if you've got anything closer than twenty feet you hafta back up to get to minimum focus distance. The Canons will handle about eight.

Exit pupil... If you point the glasses away and hold them away from your face you see bright disks. The diameter of the disks is equal to the diameter of the objective lens divided by the power. The 7x42s have 6.0 millimeter exit pupils and the 10x42s are 4.2. Little (cheap) "powerful" binoculars have tiny exit pupils - 10x20s would be two millimeter - and you hafta align the exit pupil with the relevant pupil of your eye or you see black.

Sadly/Reluctantly left my old friend in the Pelican case back home but it was the right call. You get wired into hitting the targets, adjusting focus, compensating for the downside tradeoff items. Got lotsa really spectacular views of lotsa really spectacular stuff and it was really fun letting bird tourists and locals check them out and hearing them all say "WOW!" after they'd locked on, focused, and hit the stabilizer button.

Also have never regretted for an instant my decision to go with the 10x42s.

Takes a pair of AAs, I used NiMHs, recharged at the ends of the days, never had to swap during a day. (The stabilizer clicks off after ten seconds of vertical (hang) time but if you're in the car, forget to hit the button again, lay them down in your lap...)

Get a pair of 52 millimeter UV filters for the front end so's if you scratch something it'll be a 52 millimeter UV filter. Coat the threads with petroleum jelly so's you'll be able to get them off again.

Also got a pair of collapsible rubber hoods which screw in in front of the filters to help with protection and rain.

You also NEED a harness:



'specially with big bruisers like these. Takes the weight off your neck and puts it on your shoulders, prevents them from swinging and smacking your niece and nephew in the back of the head when they're little, makes it easy to snap them up into position quickly.

The rain guard that comes with these totally sucks - and you NEED a rain guard (over the little eye end which is facing up when you're not looking at anything) for binoculars you're planning on using in the real world. It's "designed" to be secured to the strap at its right side and the strap WILL pull it off the INSTANT it's weighted. Came up with a workaround - tethered the guard to the right harness clip.

[Tad Eareckson]

2015/12/31, New Year's Eve, from a lagoon north of the River Valley Road accessed from the bridge crossing halfway between Burrell Boom and Bermudian landing. Two canoes, one guide in each, two tourists in mine, one in the other. Yours Truly wrestling a dangerous Belizean Crocodile into submission:

http://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1543/24117074459_97046c9cc1_o.jpg


Ben Goldfarb in the other canoe got the shot with his iPhone and emailed it to me yesterday morning.

The guides use headlamps to bounce orange eyeshine from the crocs and can get good feels for the sizes by what little they see above the surface. (Bit of a slow night. Not many hits and most of the stuff we got went down pretty quick and stayed there.) They'll drift up along the little guys and snatch them so's we can torture them a bit and then they go back.

I got my left index finger pad pricked by one of the longer protruding teeth - tiny but needle sharp. Four month old male. Should've let him bite me properly so's I could make the claim.

Felt a little bad handling him - even very gently - as he was croaking a distress call. About the same call as you hear on TV when the little beasts are hatching and emerging from their nest mounds and talking to mom.

http://www.bucketlisttc.com/swimming-crocodiles-peril-paradise-part-i/

http://www.bucketlisttc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Baby-Crocodile.jpg
Cherri Megasko

The guides are protective of the crocs and assure the tourists that they don't eat people. They're lying.

Two species in Belize - American and Morelet's. Didn't find that out until later in the trip and am disappointed that our guides didn't clue us in. American gets bigger, Morelet's is fresh water only. Don't know what this little guy is. Both have scored humans.

It was on that boat ride that we got a Northern Potoo or two. Also saw bats parked under the bridge and constantly zipping by out on the water.

On the final afternoon/night/morning of the trip - 2016/01/10-11 stayed at the Tropical Education Center of the Belize Zoo at a cabin built out and up over a nice pond and got real good looks at a croc of at least six feet - probably Morelet's - making slow circuits around the little island in the middle.

Also got entertained by a pair of Acorn Woodpeckers working on their stash trees and a female Lineated Woodpecker - same genus as and very similar to our spectacular Pileated - apparently bashing out a nesting cavity.

The Google Earth imagery for the relevant area is dated 2002/04/28 and wiped out by cumulus clouds. Damn.

[Steve Davy]

http://www.ushawks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2272
US Hawks - Sea to Shining Sea

Rick Masters - 2016/01/17 08:44:05 UTC

In fear for his life, he resorted to beating the powerful yet fragile creature to death against his uprights while his glider dove out of control.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKozAsNlymU
Two Eagles Catch a Wolf
Ray Phister - 2008/12/27
dead

Yeah right.

[Tad Eareckson]

Three Saturdays ago I was dizzy with the 95 degree heat and stress of having scaled the El Castillo pyramid of Xunantunich, at 130 feet the second tallest structure in Belize. (Misses out to Caracol by six.) A guy a bit ahead of me on the climb said he wished he had a hang glider for the return trip. ("Funny you should mention hang gliding...") Checked out Guatemala a kilometer to the west and Black and Turkey Vultures circling above, listened to troops of Black Howler Monkeys laying claim to territories in the jungle below.

Last Saturday was in the process of getting buried by near two and a half feet worth of Jonas. Very thankful to have made it through the night and to the end of the storm Sunday with electrical power uninterrupted.

Spent the second half of Sunday and all of Monday and Tuesday digging out, still hacking away here and there to tidy up. Lotsa sun and mostly warm temperatures helped a lot. Tuesday released a honeybee I found trying to push through the kitchen window. Good bet she was from one of the hives of the across-the-street neighbors'. Saw another airborne over the street a while later.

With snow like this the main problem very soon becomes disposing of it. My solution is to cut large rectangular blocks with a flat shovel, transport them up the steep driveway a ways, and dump them off the south downsloping side. Back and rest of body held up much better than I'd expected but sure didn't have a lot of energy left over to put into Kite Strings after sunset.

Segue back to the pyramid...

Unimaginable the labor that went into cutting those stone blocks and moving them up into position to create something that could serve as a very substantial training site at a minimum and a thermal soaring launch if one got lucky.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Xunantunich_%28High_Quality%29.jpg

[<BS>]

I have obviously underestimated their ability to avoid injury. Hopefully the same is true for smaller birds with the same instincts.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/01/dutch-netherlands-police-birds-unauthorized-drones

Eagle-eyed: Dutch police to train birds to take down unauthorised drones
"What I find fascinating is that birds can hit the drone in such a way that they don't get injured by the rotors," said LeBaron. "They seem to be whacking the drone right in the centre so they don't get hit; they have incredible visual acuity and they can probably actually see the rotors."

Humans, of course, only see rotors as a blur - LeBaron suspects that the eagles can make out the complete movement and thus have no trouble avoiding injury. It doesn't hurt, either, that attacking a drone the way a bird might attack another bird is usually effective. "Their method of attack is always going to be to hit it in the middle of the back; with the drones they perceive the rotors on the side and so they just go for the rear."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HifO-ebmE1s