[QUOTE=wolfman]
I don’t think I’ve mentioned my old crazy friend in a while. He would go on golf courses late at night, and bow hunt geese, which he then kept in his freezer for the rest of the year. I never tried it, and can only assume with their diet, and extended flying it would be horrible.
[/QUOTE]
I dunno. They just eat grass and weeds, mostly, don’t they? I would imagine they taste OK, (if a little greasy).
I have to also go with the “scavenger’s stomach” theory.
For what it’s worth, I had never run into a dead hawk until this spring. The snow had just barely melted, and I found a hawk carcass on the side of a stream in which I was attempting to find some early season trout. The internals of the hawk were gone, and only a few bones making up the body, and the wings were still attached, otherwise, it was gone.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
This is related to the common topic of where dead pigeons go. Geese aren’t as sizable as you think. They can fly. Turkeys can’t. They have a lot of hollow space and plenty of predators ready to eat them even in New Jersey. Birds can be torn apart in short order from everything from large predators to worms, to insects, to bacteria extremely rapidly. If you find a stripped goose carcass and stomp on it, it will go to almost nothing. You have to be right there when a goose dies to see it as anything substantial.
[/QUOTE]
Turkeys can fly in short bursts..see attached.
I’ve seen them go over two lanes on the parkway. Big problem with that is that they fly at windshield height.
I used to work for the Bose corporation. The campus is as big and landscaped as a very nice college campus. They had a professional handler for a team of Border Collies to either chase the geese away or heard them into specific areas. It was fun to watch them work.
[QUOTE=ltfire]
Turkeys can fly in short bursts..see attached.
I’ve seen them go over two lanes on the parkway. Big problem with that is that they fly at windshield height.
[/QUOTE]
And they can go much higher than that as well. As is always the case, while out hunting, I had the wrong weapon for the season (archery for turkey in the fall in NH, and I had a shotgun, looking for deer), and I saw a flock of turkeys fly up into some tall trees to roost near dusk. They must have gone up 40 or 50 feet. It was an amazing sight.
That video could have been my backyard, I often have turkeys flying up to the top of my swingset to sit for a while.
The same place as the chickens, and the opossa, and the raccoons-across the road.
I can watch the geese on the lawn of my office complex. One cow-orker used to feed them at the front door but they started returning the “favors” and we made him clean it up.
I got to experience a low-level flyover by a couple of hundred snow geese out in the boonies at the Salton Sea. It was so quiet, then something spooked them (not me!). That’s all it took… there was a huge noise of honking and flapping as they rose up and took flight, passing over me by 15-20 feet or so. Amazing!