A few people here are pilots. I am quite certain that none of us are as good as Ellie. These birds are amazing, I have seen them fly through places that I have a hard time walking between the trees.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/2CFckjfP-1E
A few people here are pilots. I am quite certain that none of us are as good as Ellie. These birds are amazing, I have seen them fly through places that I have a hard time walking between the trees.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/2CFckjfP-1E
Mother Nature has designed some remarkable things.
awesome
Remind me not to be a mouse/rat/rabbit/etc around one of those...the determination in that bird's eyes is ridiculous.
But can she drive a car?
Thanks for sharing that. Amazing and beautiful.
Yeah but can she do paperwork (the real test of pilot skill)?
Osterkraut wrote: Yeah but can she do paperwork (the real test of pilot skill)?
I am sure she has the same opinion of the paper work as most pilots.
Birds are truely amazing critters.. more so than anything land based
For my money, the osprey is the bird with whom you do not berkeley. We rescued a juvenile who had gotten separated from his nest and was walking around behind the mall once. The claw:rest-of-body ratio is insane.
Birds are rather fascinating creatures. Just spending time with our five parrots, we're constantly amazed at their problem solving abilities, and their abilities to take abstract concepts and put them to use in actual circumstances.
jg
lots of ospreys around here... you do NOT want to get near their nests when their are eggs or chicks in them.
I am lucky enough the be able to see bald eagles everyday that I make it home before dark in my backyard. They fly up and down the river and roost in the trees along the bank. The most I've seen at one time is 7. Very impressive and beautiful to watch, but I have yet to see any of them capture any prey. I suppose that since the river has been mostly frozen over for the past couple months that they must not be eating too many fish. I have an ocasional squirrel and rabbit in the backyard and I am rooting for the eagles as long as they swoop in for the kill while I can see them. Maybe I'll set up a hole and see of they fly through.
I saw one bald eagle... up close. I was coming back down from NYC at about 6am.. there was nobody on the Garden State Parkway as it swooped down in front of my car, seemingly 20 feet ahead of me, and for a moment, rode the "bow wave" the car was making as it pushed the air aside, and then just as easily, tilted up on one wing and soared off...
very moving.
The Ospreys hunt beautifully.. being a "fish hawk" they dive right into the water after fish.. amazing to watch
mad_machine wrote: lots of ospreys around here... you do NOT want to get near their nests when their are eggs or chicks in them.
One of our local autocross sites has floodlighting like that, complete with osprey nest just like that. It makes working that station... interesting. They're not fazed by the cars one bit.
Awesome video. Birds of prey are so cool.
Here's a Hawk we caught on Zoology camp. Those eyes!
She's definitely got the "looking ahead" thing down. Her eyes never once flickered to the opening she was jetting through.
One of the cool things about birds is that they've been around sooooo long that you can see really cool evolutionary specialization. We give a lot of parrot talks to Audubon groups, and it's really cool to point out the eye differences.
Predator birds like the raptors have huge, front mounted eyes. They trade peripheral vision for pinpoint depth perception, and a system that lets them see several spectrums of light that are completely out of reach to our eyes.
Straight up prey birds like pigeons have their eyes mounted on the sides of their head. Their near 360º peripheral vision gies them a good look at what's about to eat them.
Smaller parrots share the side-mounted eyes, but you'll also notice that larger, more badass parrots like the large cockatoos have their eyes biased forward, although they have a muscle group that allows them to precisely bug out their eyes to produce either a wider field of vision, or a narrower field with better depth perception.
I guess when you have 35,000,000 years to work on something things tend to get a bit specific.
jg
Luke wrote: Awesome video. Birds of prey are so cool. Here's a Hawk we caught on Zoology camp. Those eyes!
That is not a happy bird.
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