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From: dgraham@kean.ucs.mun.ca (David Graham)
Newsgroups: rec.birds
Subject: Harpy Eagle and Hoatzin
Message-ID: <147956@kean.ucs.mun.ca>
Date: 23 Oct 90 10:43:29 GMT
Organization: Memorial University. St.John's Nfld, Canada
Lines: 32

Added two birds to my TV list last night (thanks to David Mark for 
suggesting armchair listing!) by idly turning on PBS and happening on 
some nature programme whose name I didn't get. First segment I saw had 
a lot of very interesting footage of nesting Hoatzins in Cuyabeno, 
Ecuador, including the young birds using their wing claws to clamber 
around in the branches, and showing a young bird swimming away to hide 
after jumping out of a tree to escape a native egg collector.

The second segment was truly amazing. It concerned footage of Harpy 
Eagles shot in Guyana. Again, a nesting pair was shown feeding their 
chick over a period of about 5 months, but the best shots were of 
flying Harpies sailing over the canopy, including one of a female 
plucking a 3-kilo sloth from a treetop and flying off to the nest with 
it. The sloth was apparently about 1/2 her body weight, which seems 
incredible to me, and I was moved to wonder what bird can lift the
greatest percentage of its own body weight, and whether any bird can 
out-lift a Harpy Eagle. Monkey-eating Eagle comes to mind, but I 
believe they're slightly smaller than a Harpy. I was struck by the 
wing shape of the Harpies shown in the show: their wings are 
extraordinarily broad (i.e. from front to back) in addition to being 
very long (> 2m wingspan) and I presume this is what allows them to 
carry such large payloads. Their wingbeats are quite slow, and they 
don't look very manoeuverable, but slow-motion showed the female Harpy 
turning completely on one side to snatch the sloth off its tree-trunk, 
so they aren't clumsy either.

Magnificent-looking creatures, anyway... anyone here actually seen 
one?

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   David Graham					dgraham@kean.ucs.mun.ca  
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