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 ...
probably just floating on solitons.
I live on a knob in rural KY. The turkey buzzards are constantly riding the heat or updraft. They rarely flap their wings.
Living buck tooth and naked up in the mountains
Hillary Clinton - “Why do those damn vultures keep circling over me?”
“Hey! Gus! How many times in a hour do you suppose a condor flaps his wings?”
“I don’t know, Bob. I’ll bet some scientist somewhere has done a study on it, though.”
When our family does a road trip to your part of the country, we always appreciate seeing the turkey vultures. They’re soar so gracefully.
I remember hiking once up in the mountains of New Hampshire. As is often the case, several hawks were riding updrafts along a ridge. Then I spotted a big raven that I swear was trying to ride the currents. It’s like that raven had aspirations of soaring with the big boys.
In times of extreme heat, Patagonians were known to put condors in their shorts to help cool things off.
I’ll bet some scientist somewhere has done a study on it, though.
A safe bet.
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to help cool things off
The article says some go FIVE HOURS without flapping!
Good thing it does not get very hot in Patagonia.
Ditto that!
These were condors that we’re trying to lose weight.
What ticks me off is that I have 32 acres and my daughter and her husband only have six, yet they have a tree in the front and one in the back that each has five or six turkey buzzards that spend the night in them every nihgt. You see them all slowly losing altitude, making a few low passes and landing in the trees at dusk, and then at dawn, they sit there holding out their wings to dry before taking off to tackle a new day of delicious carrion.
All vultures fly that way, it’s not news to me.
Once from a hotel room balcony way above the streets of Lima, Peru I spotted what looked like a small airplane. As it came closer I realized it was a Condor skimming over the city. Their wingspan is VERY large.
Saw a condor at my flight level once - 21,000 feet.
Saw a condor at my flight level once - 21,000 feet.
Long ago a pilot friend mentioned something similar.
This was pre-internet and being a skeptic I called around.
Some bird guy knew all about it!
Radar tracking, sighting from plains, mountain climbers...
Yes, he said they can go very high!
Google says...Ruppell’s griffon vulture
The two highest-flying bird species on record are the endangered Ruppell’s griffon vulture, which has been spotted flying at 37,000 feet (the same height as a coasting commercial airplane), and the bar-headed goose, which has been seen flying over the Himalayas at heights of nearly 28,000 feet.
How do you suppose they carry all the oxygen tanks?
Yup and $300,000,000 from US Taxpayers Probably
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