Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms....

Texas State's plans for a body farm have been put on hold because buzzards circling over the cadavers could pose a threat to planes taking off and landing from a nearby airport.

Here in Tennessee, we do it right.

Texas State plans to install cages over the bodies to prevent buzzards from eating the experiments, but it seems reasonable to assume that buzzard damage would occur to bodies lying in the open in Texas anyway. Won't the cages skew the data? I imagine difficulties in trying to determine time of death from a cadaver that has been reduced to buzzard leftovers in the field , especially if all of the data sets for your local environment come from samples that lay under cages.

Here is a highly (un)patentable idea:

Design a remote detector for human DNA about the size of a quarter. Use the techniques employed for remote biological warfare detection systems. Then attach these detectors to thousands of buzzard beaks with aerospace epoxy and fit the buzzards with GPS. Next configure the system to send GPS coordinates and a timestamp if a buzzard begins to eat human remains. Voila! Instant missing dead person detection system! Caveat: For the system to work, the dead person must be outside and not buried, and be tasty.