California Condor is rebounding.

countryboy said:
Our vultures don't winter here, and they are famous for returning to Hinckley Ohio on the same day every year. https://www.tripsavvy.com/buzzards-of-hinckley-752532

"Every March 15 since 1957, the city of Hinckley eagerly awaits the return of the buzzards from their winter hiatus. Around dawn, an official spotter and hundreds of other people with binoculars peel their eyes upward to be the first to spot the buzzards coming back to Buzzard's Roost at Hinckley Reservation in the Cleveland Metroparks."
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Interesting. They don't seem to have any problem with NY winters.
 
Cypress said:
In this day and age of a presidential family that enjoys murdering elephants, leopards, and giraffes, let us pause to tip the hat to the environmentalists, conservationists, and legislators who had the foresight and comittment to pass landmark environmental legislation in the early 1970s like the Endangered Species Act.
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If they resided in Texas some gun nut Bubba would have shot the last one a long time ago and would still be bragging about it.
 
countryboy said:
You couldn't celebrate the rebounding of a species without making it political? Oh well, glad the California condor is making a comeback. Growing up in San Diego, I was always fascinated as a kid, with a stuffed California condor on display at the Natural History Museum. Now that I live in Ohio, one of my favorite local avians is the Turkey vulture, a relative of The California condor, and a magnificent flyer. I always look forward to their return in spring.
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Yup. An amazing bird that I consider a colleague in the waste management business.

Had an incident at work that nearly gave a coworker a heart attack. I work in a office building with mirrored windows. Unfortunately those are almost invisible to birds and the constantly fly into them and die as a result.

One time a Turkey Vulture flew into a window and scared the bejeebers out of the CSR on the other side.
 
Phantasmal said:
I like watching them feed, too.
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I like watching Canadian geese fly. They have team drafting down better than any race car driver. The intelligence they have to change from a rotating line, to a v formation, to an echelon based on wind conditions and how by doing that they can fly farther and faster than a single bird. The intelligence to figure this out is remarkable.
 
Cypress said:
My buddy who works with Fish and Wildlife Service convinced me to take this ornithology class with him. More fun than a barrel of monkeys.
In terms of evolution, these things are really flying dinosaurs.

I think you actually could teach the class, because that neuron density and brainpower of birds is exactly what was discussed today. One test that was conducted with birds is floating a worm on some water in a glass tube just out of reach of the crows beak. The crows were able to easily figure out that if they added pebbles to the tube the water level would rise bringing the worm to within reach of the crows beak.

Wow. That is a level of intelligence that requires thinking three or four moves ahead. I know of some buck toothed hillbillies that would not be able to solve that puzzle!
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Many avian species, particularly the parrot family, have brain to body mass ratios comparable to humans and cetaceans so their demonstrating significant cognitive skills really isn’t that surprising.

Which brings up an interesting question. If this is true of birds and their transitional evolutionary species what does this tell us about dinosaurs? A common view is that as reptiles they had primitive cognitive skills. Wouldn’t the evidence we have from birds and the fossil record indicate that this view of dinosaurs is seriously wrong?
 
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Mott the Hoople said:
Many avian species, particularly the parrot family, have brain to body mass ratios comparable to humans and cetaceans so their demonstrating significant cognitive skills really isn’t that surprising.

Which brings up an interesting question. If this is true of birds and their transitional evolutionary species what does this tell us about dinosaurs? A common view is that as reptiles they had primitive cognitive skills. Wouldn’t the evidence we have from birds and the fossil record indicate that this view of dinosaurs is seriously wrong?
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I expect that it is completely wrong. After all, science has shown that the belief that they were slow and cold-blooded was incorrect. I imagine that they were brightly-colored, too.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Many avian species, particularly the parrot family, have brain to body mass ratios comparable to humans and cetaceans so their demonstrating significant cognitive skills really isn’t that surprising.

Which brings up an interesting question. If this is true of birds and their transitional evolutionary species what does this tell us about dinosaurs? A common view is that as reptiles they had primitive cognitive skills. Wouldn’t the evidence we have from birds and the fossil record indicate that this view of dinosaurs is seriously wrong?
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Our understanding of the physiology and cognitive capacity of dinosaurs has substantially evolved in the last 30 years.

The lumbering, cold-blooded, dim-witted lizards we learned about in our youth simply was wrong, by most accounts.

The professor of the ornithology course I am taking maintains that the evidence is nearly unequivocal that modern birds are really direct descendants of dinosaurs, not just distant relatives of dinosaurs. That they are actually living, breathing dinosaurs that made it past the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.
 
PoliTalker said:
Hello Celticguy,



Do you have documented examples of California Condors being injured / killed by wind generators?
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Do i ? I have read of it but i failed to anticipate you being uninformed and did not save them.
Raptors were hard hit with turbines placed in mountain passes (a regular spot for them as they are almost always windy). Happens to be favored by raptors as it aids soaring .
 
Hello Celticguy,

Celticguy said:
Do i ? I have read of it but i failed to anticipate you being uninformed and did not save them.
Raptors were hard hit with turbines placed in mountain passes (a regular spot for them as they are almost always windy). Happens to be favored by raptors as it aids soaring .
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I see. So you have no examples, no links backing up your claims.

And the condors are making a huge come-back. Something like 20 fold.

Doesn't sound like a problem to me.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
I like watching Canadian geese fly. They have team drafting down better than any race car driver. The intelligence they have to change from a rotating line, to a v formation, to an echelon based on wind conditions and how by doing that they can fly farther and faster than a single bird. The intelligence to figure this out is remarkable.
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I fell in love with them when I moved to Alaska, they mate for life. There was a female injured by an arrow in our cu de sac, the male was pacing around her in distress, making a very sad sound. We called fish and game, they came and captured the birds and I got a happy report that the female would recover.
 
Celticguy said:
Do i ? I have read of it but i failed to anticipate you being uninformed and did not save them.
Raptors were hard hit with turbines placed in mountain passes (a regular spot for them as they are almost always windy). Happens to be favored by raptors as it aids soaring .
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Wind turbines need to be designed, engineered, operated, and located to be as safe as possible to avian and bat species.

The amount of bird deaths related to oil extraction, coal power plants, mining, resource extraction, petroleum drilling and production, and the climate change associated with burning fossil fuels kills more birds - by many, many, many orders of magnitude - than wind turbines.

If our one and only concern were actually minimizing bird deaths, we would shut down all petroleum and mineral extraction, and associated power plants and supporting infrastructure tomorrow and immediately switch to wind turbines.

If you were genuinely concerned about bird deaths, your first priority would be stopping petroleum extraction, power plants, and the infrastructure associated with burning fossil fuels.
 
Hello Cypress,

Cypress said:
Wind turbines need to be designed, engineered, operated, and located to be as safe as possible to avian and bat species.

The amount of bird deaths related to oil extraction, coal power plants, mining, resource extraction, petroleum drilling and production, and the climate change associated with burning fossil fuels kills more birds - by many, many, many orders of magnitude - than wind turbines.

If our one and only concern were actually minimizing bird deaths, we would shut down all petroleum and mineral extraction, and associated power plants and supporting infrastructure tomorrow and immediately switch to wind turbines.

If you were genuinely concerned about bird deaths, your first priority would be stopping petroleum extraction, power plants, and the infrastructure associated with burning fossil fuels.
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More birds are killed on American highways than by wind turbines.
 
Hello Phantasmal,

Phantasmal said:
I fell in love with them when I moved to Alaska, they mate for life. There was a female injured by an arrow in our cu de sac, the male was pacing around her in distress, making a very sad sound. We called fish and game, they came and captured the birds and I got a happy report that the female would recover.
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Cool story.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
I like watching Canadian geese fly. They have team drafting down better than any race car driver. The intelligence they have to change from a rotating line, to a v formation, to an echelon based on wind conditions and how by doing that they can fly farther and faster than a single bird. The intelligence to figure this out is remarkable.
Click to expand...

The most impressive bird I have ever seen up close is the Andean condor, which is purported to be significantly larger than its California cousins.

The Venezuelans told me this bird has a ten foot wingspan! I was really taken aback at how large these things are when you see them up close.
 
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