Posted on 07/14/2020 9:39:04 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
The Andean condor has a wingspan stretching to 10 feet and weighs up to 33 pounds, making it the heaviest soaring bird alive today. For the first time, a team of scientists strapped recording equipment they called “daily diaries” to eight condors in Patagonia to record each wingbeat over more than 250 hours of flight time. ... One bird flew more than five hours, covering more than 100 miles (160 km), without flapping its wings.
“Condors are expert pilots — but we just hadn’t expected they would be quite so expert,”
“When you see condors circling, they are taking advantage of those thermal uplifts,”
The recording devices were programmed to fall off the birds after about a week.
Retrieving them wasn’t so easy. “Sometimes the devices dropped off into nests on huge cliffs in the middle of the Andes mountains, and we needed three days just to get there,”
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
You don’t see them bragging about it.
Perhaps a better press agent would help?
That said, most of the news is based on twitter trends...
Your albatross friends may be better off saving their money.
Yeah. They are cool. And we love their humility. They only want what others no longer need.
They’ll go up to 40k feet - I think they hold their breath.
I was going to mention turkey vultures (that’s what we call them in California), too. As you say, you rarely see them flap their wings.
None of my plane flights at 37,000 feet were coasting. The pilot kept the engines on the whole time. It would probably be a lot quieter and more peaceful if we were coasting, though. At least for a while.
We call them both. Buzzards or vultures. :)
“How do you suppose they carry all the oxygen tanks?”
When you eat what they eat you learn to hold your breath for a long time.
Right? Don’t make the camera a drone that could actually fly back down somewhere easy to pick it up, let the bird drop it in a cliff face so you and your crew can get a nice government paid climbing experience... all so we can learn that these birds don’t flap their wings and they fly in circles.
Sounds about right to me!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.