Oriental Honey Buzzard
A good thing about early morning walks is the bird life you can see around campus. There’s a surprising amount, considering the amount of early-morning gunfire from the adjacent military firing range, which you’d think would scare them off. This morning I saw a nice Oriental (crested) Honey Buzzard overhead – very big and impressive. This one was headed towards the woods and the lovely dawn chorus of machine-gun fire, but on other occasions I’ve been walking around the athletic track when one took off from a nearby tree and swooped around, flying low, over the heads of the dawn exercisers.
They’re called honey buzzards because they like to raid beehives and eat the larvae.