[TowerTalk] Bird Kill Towers?

[Bgsalesmel at cs.com]

Hi all,

I think this "reporter" just had a case of the "what do I write today" blues. 
But, the one suggestion about "something else" being involved like whales 
beaching themselves may be closer to fact than first thought.

Being a pilot, I often wondered about our Radar sites and birds. Once had the 
chance to ask a FAA repairman about this and he said "sometimes" he would 
find many dead birds "around" one of this rotating dish antennas - but, not all 
the time. Some of these were monster installations for 150 miles plus 
range...The magnetrons looked like trash cans! There was one dish at Long Beach, CA 
that sat right out in the open where you drove into the old terminal - ran 24/7 
as I recall. It had a rather fast rotation speed, to my way of thinking...about 
15 or 20 feet above the roadway, right in the edge of a golf course. I 
remember one of the lawn guys saying that sometimes (not always) they found some 
dead birds like 15 to 25 feet from the moving dish circle. I got the feeling that 
most must have been "batted" out of the air by the thing rather than fried by 
the energy from it. These Radar sites must have us beat for power output by 
at least 3 or 4 orders of magnitude!

Anyone ever noticed that little birds don't like to fly in high winds? How 
about during a rain storm? How about many thousands "sitting out a storm" and 
taking a lightning strike? Might explain the big numbers showing up, eh?

73,
Mel
KD7DCR