If somebody told me 15 years ago that if you were out jogging you might get attacked by a buzzard I would have thought they were talking complete rubbish. In my experience buzzards were very shy and never allowed you close unless you were driving past at a fair speed in a car.
When I lived in Bavaria my favourite jog was out of our small town along a cycle path to the next village. You left the village then passed a large wood on the left for about 200 metres then hit open countryside. About 10 years ago around this time of year I was doing my early morning jog. I had noticed that at least one buzzard pair had nested about 100 metres into the wood and noticed that the pair were soaring nearby. To my complete amazement one of them did a V-shaped dive behind me coming within a metre of my head; my head being the bottom of the V. There was a big whoosh of a downdraught. Then the mate did the same. They then let me jog on to the next village undisturbed. I was quite worried as I would not have wanted talons or the hooked beak to connect with my head. I concluded that they showed strongly territorial behaviour because of chicks or fledglings in the nearby nest.
In 2004, I read about a buzzard attacking a cyclist in Devon. It seemed like a similar pattern. Cyclists being attacked by buzzards was reported in early June near Zeist, Netherlands.
This week I had a day in Munich on business and was interested to read the TZ newspaper. This paper (27 June 2007) had headlines of a jogger being attacked by a buzzard (a search in www.google.de shows that this was not isolated).
This jogger near Rosenheim experienced a hard hit on the back of his head and thought a branch had fallen on him. He heard the wingbeat over his head then the buzzard went onto a tree 20 metres away and screamed at him. He then realised his head was bleeding a lot. A local falconer said that buzzards with freshly hatched chicks defend their nests up to a radius of 200 metres. However real contact attacks are rare; I'm just glad I got off lightly!
