The Buzzard's Secret Orville Wright, whose pioneer airplane has just
been returned to the! United States, after exhibition in England, gave it the name of "Kitty Hawk." Why ? When I visited him years ago in Ohio, he told me that both he and Wilbur, that par nobile fratrum, used to spend inordinate hours in watching the buzzards, the biggest of all hawks, circling over Washington. What especially concerned them was the capacity to keep, elevation without movement of the wings. They never tumbled to the secret. You would have thought it obvious after seeing gulls, for example,' swept upwards by winds turned vertically by the interruption of a cliff) It was only, said Wright, after they themselves had flown that they realised the frequent presence of upward draughts. He thought the concentric plan of Washington especially well adapted to create vertical, currents of air. The soaring flight of the buzzard is, of course, peculiarly spectacular and effortless, at least among inland birds. The lesser albatross' is a yet greater artist.
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