DECATUR, Tenn. — My friend Erik Almy spotted and photographed the black vulture above near Watts Bar Dam recently. Some people refer to vultures as buzzards, but no matter what you call them, for the purposes of this article we will call it “H-21.”
Almy shared the photo of H-21 with me to see if I knew anything about why it might be sporting a prominent wing tag. I am familiar with lots of banding research on birds and migration patterns, in which various species are captured and bands are affixed to their legs. But this type of marking of any bird was new to me.
However, it didn’t take very much Googling for me to track down Dr. Scott Rush with Mississippi State University (MSU).
For at least six years Dr. Rush has been conducting research to analyze and hopefully mitigate human-wildlife conflicts, with special emphasis on potentially deadly air encounters for pilots…