New Study Shares Movements of Broad-winged Hawks

Now’s the time to join researchers at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, Kempton, Pa, and track online the amazing journey of  four broad-winged hawks, tracing their long-distance movements from Pennsylvania to Central and South America, using an easy-to-use movement map at hawkmountain.org/broadwing.

The tool is available thanks to the latest satellite telemetry technology and the tiny transmitters attached to each bird: two juveniles—“America” and “Hawk Eye”—from  a nest at  Hawk Mountain, “Abbo,” an adult that was trapped and tagged in New Ringgold, and another juvenile named “Kit” from a nest in Shartlesville.

“The adult left her nest area in July. The three juvenile birds started moving away from their nest sites in late August, and this week, they began moving south,” says Dr. Laurie Goodrich, the senior monitoring biologist at the Sanctuary and study coordinator.“Now they need to soar more than 4,000 miles to winter in Central or South America,” she adds.

The study marks the first time a telemetry unit has ever been placed on a juvenile broadwing, as well as the first time scientists have a chance to compare movements of siblings from the same nest. The research, which started in spring with nest monitoring, is funded by a Pennsylvania Game Commission State Wildlife Grant with support from ATAS International, the Kittatinny Coalition, and other private donors and supporters. 

“Because we’re using the newer units, if all goes well and the birds survive their journey, we can track the four for up to two years,” Goodrich explains.

“At Hawk Mountain, the broad-winged hawk is the most numerous migrant but the vast majority of birds counted pass within a narrow time frame. As of September 12, as many as 675 broadwings per day have passed and the number will quickly crescendo to more hundred-bird flocks by mid month, and several thousand can pass during the peak of the flight, historically sometime between September 13 to 20.

To learn more about the study or to sponsor a tagged bird, please visit hawkmountain.org/broadwing or email goodrich@hawkmtn.org.

Tales from the platform

Red-tailed Hawk - Luke Tiller

Hawkcount does an amazing job helping us tally the migration of hawks across the Americas. I can safely say that without being accused of being biased as I have nothing to do with its design or upkeep here at HMANA. This month is also Hawkcount Now and Forever fundraising month (which you can read more about here). One of my most recent discoveries is how easy Hawkcount's simple interface makes it to update via your smartphone while you are in the field - I wish I'd noted that when I was actively counting this season!  As someone who uses it on a regular basis as a hawkwatcher and trawls through it to write up flyway accounts it does have some limitations when it comes to capturing some of the more esoteric moments of a season in a way that is readily accessible to those scanning through the reports.

Bobcat @ Quaker Ridge - Shaun Martin

A cursory scan of the front page of Hawkcount does allow readers to pick up good rare raptors like the pair of Mississippi  Kites I had one day at Quaker Ridge, CT (blog post here) or the Gyrfalcon at Braddock Bay, NY, but what it captures less effectively is the dark Broad-winged Hawk or completely white Turkey Vulture (picture here) I had at Braddock. A cursory scan of the Hawkcount front page gives you the numbers from a days count, but no real feel for a day that over a thousand Broad-winged Hawks passed at treetop height during the last hour of the watch at Quaker Ridge while all assembled looked on astounded as the birds passed by or settled in around us.

Cave Swallow - Luke Tiller

Hawkcount is a great tool for capturing raw raptor data, but it doesn't always highlight all of the excitement of what we do and why we do it unless you start to thoroughly explore each report. Buried in the notes of these reports are the time Cave Swallows soared over Quaker Ridge long enough for me to run inside and get members of staff out to witness only the second inland appearance of this species in the state (pictures here), the Sandhill Cranes tracked from Cape Cod, MA all the way to Scott's Mountain, NJ via our watch (and their return visit the next year), the five Snowy Owls visible at the same time from the platform at Braddock this April or a flock of grackles I witnessed that would have rivaled many of Audubon's florid descriptions of Passenger Pigeon flocks.

Star-nosed Mole - Luke Tiller

Sightings of rare butterflies, the star nosed mole that sent hawkwatchers running around the Audubon Greenwich Center to get a net to scoop him out of a storm drain he had tumbled into (blog post here) or the Bobcat that sauntered across the hawkwatch lawn at Quaker Ridge (facebook page here), which Shaun Martin managed to snap photos of last week. It's these kind of stories that make spending hours watching for raptors so special. It's these kind of stories we want to share with other hawkwatchers. So please share them with us and allow us to give them a wider audience among your fellow hawkwatchers,  HMANA members and supporters. Send us your blog posts and links to photographs and allow us to share those stories with the rest of the community. You can send them in a message to us on facebook via our page (here) or email them to info@hmana.org