Buzzard Day

Today is Buzzard Day in Hinckley Township, Ohio just south of Cleveland. Every year on March 15th flocks of buzzards (aka turkey vultures) return from their winter hiatus to roost in the ledges of Cleveland Metropark’s Hinckley Reservation. Visitors have been witnessing the return of these birds since the first Buzzard Sunday in 1957.

In 1968, Cleveland's WHK-FM stopped simulcasting the Top-40 of their AM sister station, switched to Progressive Rock and changed calls to WMMS (W MetroMedia Stereo--in reference to their owner at the time.) The next year saw brief flirtations with Adult Standards and another switch back to Top-40 but by the early 70s WMMS was once again a Rock station and has remained so to this day.
In 1974 the station started using a cartoon buzzard as its logo. During the glory years of WMMS, from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, they were at or near the top of the ratings and the buzzard became synonymous with rock and roll in Cleveland. According to former program director John Gorman (a co-creator of the logo) the choice of the buzzard as the WMMS mascot had nothing to do with the annual Buzzard Day in Hinckley and that they didn’t know there was such an event until a listener told them. They did however become a sponsor of the event in 1976 with disastrous results as thousands of long haired rockers descended on the park like a mini-Woodstock. The next year the station was asked not to mention Buzzard Day on the air and local elementary school children were not allowed to draw the WMMS logo for their annual assignment of drawing a buzzard.
Sadly, in 2007 the Clear Channel-owned WMMS dropped the buzzard mascot. Or, in the words of one of their programmers, “de-emphasized” the icon (their current logo still has orange wings on either side of the call letters and frequency.)

UPDATE: As of December, 2011 the WMMS website once again features the buzzard mascot (wearing a Cleveland Browns helmet.)