🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 12 Oct 1999 13:22:35 -0500, C R Nugent <crnugent@tamu.edu>
wrote:

>I think that's the point, raptors can't hover without wind. It's more of
>a gliding, to me, than a hovering. I too have seen Red Tail and
>Swainson's Hawks, near motionless, waiting for their prey to poke it's
>head out of the brush in the Chihuahuan desert of west Texas, held aloft
>by columns of warm air rising, but take away that wind...

Both White-tailed Kites and American Kestrels hover quite well in air
so still that a person on the ground nearby can't detect any breeze.
It's hard to determine how much air movement there is where they are,
50 or 100 ft above the ground, but there surely isn't much.

The Attenborough programs have wonderful photography, but others have
pointed out a number of errors in them. (mis-identified hummingbirds,
for example, in a Lanny Chambers post to this NG) I'm not sure about
the size of the African Pied Kingfisher relative to the W.T. Kite.
However, they may be no better at hovering, a term suited to the
popular focus of the TV series.


George Oetzel, Menlo Park, CA
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