What School Won't Prepare You For

"Training is useful, but there is no substitute for experience!"

It isn't just a memorable statement by the evil Colonel from one of the few decent Bond films made (From Russia, with Love), it's the most fundamental element to good hawkwatching. With spring raptor migration now in full swing at my watchsite, I'm routinely asked by inquisitive and frustrated visitors alike how they can get better at IDing hawks. They seek information about the “diagnostic” fieldmarks for particular species. They ask for book recommendations. They even ask about the optics I use, as if oversized milspec binoculars and a fancy spotting scope were indeed the secret ingredient in my hawkwatching recipe. (Answer: Good optics minimize visual handicaps, but they won't identify birds for you!) I am always grateful for people's interest in hawkwatching (and raptors, generally), so I make a point to try to helpfully answer any and all questions I receive. Subconsciously, I think I try hard to recreate some of the conditions that enabled me to start watching hawks seriously at my old hawkwatch. It was there a particular counter patiently answered endless questions and made an unflagging effort to drill my fledging skills over the course of my season with him. It's not often nascent enthusiasm is met almost immediately with personal tutelage by a skilled hand, and so I owe him a great debt. He unknowingly started me down an avenue in my life I never anticipated!

But back to the topic at hand, what's most striking about the questions I receive has nothing to with the actual questions. (Because there are no “stupid questions”!) It's that I generally receive them from enthusiastic visitors who'll spend, at most, 40 minutes or an hour on the hill with me maybe twice or thrice a season. I'll take a leap of faith here and assume that I'm not functioning as the main impediment to their learning process or enjoyment on the hill. And, I do understand that Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of even the best intentions of making recreation for oneself. But within most of the questions I receive, I can almost hear the underlying assumption that one can learn to ID hawks proficiently by simply reading a book (or two) or by getting pointers from a “pro” in the field. There are indeed some excellent books about the field identification of raptors available, and some of them are quite accessible. And, undoubtedly, guidance in the field by a skilled observer is a sure-fire way of improving your skills relatively quickly. But the most neglected component is time: the only way you become naturally good at identifying hawks is by spending an unnatural amount of time in the field watching them! And I think that while most of my visitors understand this cerebrally, it's a different story viscerally when it comes time to pony up and put in your hours on the hill that day scanning for hawks instead of engaging in another more familiar activity.

I offer my views here not to be harsh to my kind visitors, but to be realistic about the effort that will be involved in learning to hawkwatch “like the pros” do. In no way do I wish to deter anyone interested in watching hawks from doing so at their own pace! Frankly, I feel that the only people who really oughta know what they're seeing are the people whose observations become part of the data submitted to HawkCount. For most everyone else, it probably does not matter if they cannot separate a Red-tailed Hawk from a Sharp-shinned Hawk in the field. If this applies to you, I hope you will learn, however, only because I feel it will greatly increase your appreciation of these birds to have seen and identified them for yourself. But upon reflection, if you feel the effort to learn to ID raptors and "become part of the count" requires more effort than you're willing to invest, that's perfectly okay, and I hope you won't let birders pressure you into thinking otherwise. And I hope you won't be dissuaded from coming to your hawkwatch just because you don't feel you know enough! I think this happens more often than anyone cares to admit, and I think this is the biggest travesty of all. Ultimately, hawkwatching needs you, whether you're expert or neophyte. And the majesty of the migration spectacle is there to be enjoyed and protected by all; and this is probably the best “pro” tip you'll ever receive!

Good Hawkwatching,
Arthur

The Grey Hawk and the Garrobo

“Wow!” exclaimed my husband, one afternoon as we sat quietly reading on our terrazzo. We lived in a small town on the Pacific coast of Mexico this past winter, where we were treated to the daily sights of raptors not seen in our New England area. Zone-tailed Hawks, Short-tailed Hawks and Grey Hawks were among those that frequently passed over our house, giving us views and photo-ops of those species which, while quite common there, are still novel enough to us that we stop what we’re doing to admire and study them.

This “wow” moment was triggered by the arrival of a Grey Hawk onto a branch of a tall palm at the edge of our garden. We watched as she (we guessed the bird was possibly a female due to her large-ish size) quickly side-stepped along the main stem of the big frond, and disappeared into the central cluster of branches at the top of the tree. We wondered if perhaps there was a nest, or a nest-to-be. The next afternoon she was back, sitting for a while out in the open before once again retreating into the cluster.



When we saw her arrive a third time she remained perched on the central stem of one of the stouter fronds, and seemed to be staring down at us, or at something fairly nearby.

I had seen the occasional small lizard darting about in the garden, but nothing that I guessed would tempt a predator of the size of our grey visitor. No ground squirrels were in our neighborhood, and the only nest I could see was that of a Cinnamon Hummingbird above our patio steps. And then we realized that we hadn’t been seeing “Garrobo.” Garrobo is the colloquial name of the black spiny-tailed iguana, which can grow to over a meter in length. Nose to tail tip our particular garrobo was maybe 30 inches. He daily basked on the terracotta tiles roofing a small outbuilding at the edge of the garden, and we had been watching him each day as he adjusted his position according to the sun angle. This shed was below a certain tall palm tree. The day we realized we hadn’t seen him was the day after our last visit from the Grey Hawk.

Could a Grey Hawk take a garrobo? Was this a coincidence? A few days later a garrobo was again basking on the roof of the shed. We’ll never know for sure that it was the same garrobo which had maybe hidden away during the visits of the hawk, patiently waiting until she found a meal elsewhere. Whatever the case, we never saw the hawk return to our yard.

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Photos by W. Fogleman



It's Time for RAPTORTHON!

Spring has sprung, and it is time for another HMANA Raptorthon! Now in its third year, this fundraiser is fun and entertaining way to raise money and awareness for raptors and hawkwatching across North America. Some teams have already signed up and picked their dates for their big day. Consider forming a team of your own to support your local hawkwatch and HMANA.

This year my team, Braddock Bay Raptor Research (BBRR), will hold its Raptorthon on May 12, which falls during the latter part of the spring raptor migration. For the third spring in a row, we will attempt to count the most raptor species we can from the Braddock Bay hawkwatch, located on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Last year BBRR earned the accomplishment of having counted the most raptor species out of all the teams that participated, and we hope to do it again! We were proud to have doubled our funds raised last year, and we were able to use the money to help build a new display board for our hawkwatch platform. This year our goal is to raise enough money to cover a sponsorship for our Hawkcount.org page, and to help cover our housing costs for our hawkwatcher.

Because the month of May is a great time to see Bald Eagles ring migration at Braddock Bay, this year’s Raptorthon event has taken on an eagle theme. BBRR will be holding several eagle related programs and activities for this “Eagle Day” including observation time with a live bald eagle named Liberty, who is an educational ambassador from the Institute for Environmental Learning in Hilton, NY. There will also be eagle crafts and activities for our younger visitors. Of course there will be hawkwatching, and there will also be a chance for people to “adopt” hawks that are banded at our raptor banding station.

There are many ways to conduct a Raptorthon, and you don’t need to be an experienced hawkwatcher or even have a favorite hawkwatch to do so. BBRR takes advantage of the fact that we conduct a spring hawk count and can utilize the beautiful Braddock Bay Park which is easily accessible to participants. Our goal is not only to raise much needed funds for our site and HMANA, but to also reach out to the community and share the enjoyment and importance of hawkwatching as a whole. A great thing about doing a Raptorthon is that you can create one to suit your needs. Visit HMANA’s website at http://hmana.org for Raptorthon ideas, or to make a pledge to support the team of your choice.

Daena Ford

Co-Director, Braddock Bay Raptor Research

Membership Secretary, Hawk Migration Association of North America

Hawkwatching As Meditation

I’m occasionally reminded how unusual hawkwatching really is as a subculture of the birding world, to say nothing of society itself. Many of you probably find it as difficult as I do to fully explain to the uninitiated your compulsion to spend so much time in a single spot, looking for birds. As a counter, I hear it all too often, “Don’t you get bored up here?” But I don’t. This is not to say I don’t experience more than my fair share of boredom, especially on slow, hot, windless days where the world almost seems in stasis apart from the sun creeping a slow arc across the sky. (Or slow, cold days, for that matter!) But to say I am bored, generally speaking, even when firmly mired in a string of slow bird days, would be completely incorrect. Put simply, the questioner assumes motivations on my part that would not be sustainable in the long-term if they were my only reasons for going out to watch hawks. It’s not just hope for strong flights or rare species that keeps me coming back up the hill each day, because I’d probably spend many of my days there disappointed if that were so. Instead, I rarely ever feel more keenly alive, if you will, as when I’m out hawkwatching. And one of the reasons why is because hawkwatching, for me, is as much about a certain reverence for the passage of time seen most obviously in the change of the seasons. To stand in a single location for so long is to witness Magic, firsthand; a single location can exhibit an astonishing spectrum of personality throughout the year, one that is usually missed unless one is willing to stand there, receptively, and become part of what you see. The confluence of birds, foliage, and cloudform can be intoxicating! And I think anyone with loyalty to a particular hawkwatch, even one that might not command mind-blowing end-of-season figures most years, probably knows, at least subconsciously, what I speak of.

If all this is too “New Age” for your tastes, I apologize! But for so many of us, even those entrenched in analyzing the vast amount of data that hawkwatchers produce each season, I believe that there is an almost spiritual underpinning for our passion, one core to our reasons for spending some slice of our lives doing this and not some other activity. With many spring sites now online and posting daily to HawkCount, I find myself with a bit of Zugunruhe as I prepare to depart to the Midwest US to conduct my own count. Or, perhaps, it’s really just a twinge of envy for those hawkwatchers fortunate enough to have counts that start earlier than mine. In any case, my feeling is not logical, and I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way. So I share some of my feelings for why I do what I do should you have the same yearnings each year to use your time at your favorite hawkwatch to take in as much of the world around as you possible; and, if only for a moment, to see past many of the expectations we impose on ourselves and simply Enjoy.

From all of us at HMANA,
May spring bring you spirited flight!

New Hawk Migration Studies arriving soon!

After a non-winter here in Pennsylvania that felt like a never-ending November, spring feels long overdue even though it’s arriving early. The first spring hawkwatches are already open and counting hawks. And with that is soon to come the spring issue of Hawk Migration Studies.

Here’s just a little of what you will find inside. Greg Grove analyzes years of winter raptor surveys and reports on findings. Arthur Green tells us about his fall hawkwatching season in the Republic of Georgia. How does more than 800,000 birds sound? Janice Sweet reports on a not-so-great 2010 fall season at the Illinois Beach hawkwatch. HMANA’s new board and officers are listed, and former Chair Will Weber is back as the new board chair for 2012, so his Will’s Quills column is back, too. Julie Brown reports on the new Raptor Population Index trend analysis that includes lots more hawkwatches and hawkwatch data. And all the new from the flyway reports are there, too. Of course.

Look for the spring HMS coming soon to your mailbox.

HMANA's South Florida Birding Tour a Success!

By Phil Brown, HMANA Florida guide

Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to co-lead, along with Florida ecology and bird expert, Rafael Galvez, a birding and natural history tour to south Florida. Eight delightful participants traveled with us around the southern peninsula of Florida, from Sanibel Island to Flamingo to the shore of Lake Okeechobee. The focus of the tour was the Everglades system, a unique and expansive patchwork of natural and human-altered conditions completely within the subtropical zone, where we explored all of this region’s major ecosystems. Our group stomped through sawgrass along the Florida Trail, explored slash pine rocklands and flatwoods, and West Indian hardwood hammocks that contain some of the greatest tree diversity in the country, traversed cypress domes, sloughs, and mangrove estuaries, as waded in tidal mudflats. We also ventured to both coasts – the Atlantic and the Gulf – and spent a day on renowned Sanibel Island, where we were guided by special guests and Sanibel winter residents, Don and Lillian Stokes.

Among the 162 species of birds tallied during the six-day tour, we saw some incredible birds – flocks of American white pelicans with roseate spoonbills and reddish egrets, and a handful of shorebirds species on the mudflats of Ding Darling; anhingas with nestlings of several different ages; calling sandhill cranes; almost ghostly snowy plovers on the white sand beaches of Sanibel; a shorebird double-take: a long-billed curlew; four scissor-tailed flycatchers and a western kingbird in a single scope view (not to mention the vermillion flycatcher just down the road); a single smooth-billed ani; two pair of painted buntings at Corkscrew Swamp; and my personal favorite which resulted from a successful three-hour search: the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.

Raptors were plentiful, with 14 of the 18 possible south Florida species located. Being a HMANA trip, one would expect no less. We saw a short-tailed hawk followed less than a minute later by a Swainson’s hawk heading in the same trajectory. A distant glimpse of the elusive and imperiled snail kite was all we could manage, but the back story of invasive mussels and an imbalanced water management scenario explains why that may have been. In addition to some of the more unusual species, there were simply impressive numbers of some of the common raptor species. There were more red-shouldered hawks and American kestrels on wires, and ospreys on nests, than anyone could imagine, and great looks at a multitude of the regal crested caracara in open prairie country. And, let’s not forget owls: our group tracked down four species, including close looks at both barn and burrowing owls.

The tour’s primary focus was on birds, but our group stopped to observe and enjoy creatures great and small including manatees, American crocodile, river otter, green anole, Julia longwing, white peacock, giant swallowtail, and zebra heliconia (butterflies), Florida red-bellied turtle, cane toad, and even the  venomous water moccasin! We also didn’t neglect the Pomacea snails (both invasive and native), nor the diverse tree and plant species with names like gumbo limbo, pond cypress, and Tillandsia (bromeliads).

Our south Florida tour was full of adventure and learning, and in just six full days, provided a memorable, in-depth look into the region’s varied habitats and birdlife. Between Rafael’s in depth knowledge of the ecosystems, the pace and organization of the tour, and our group’s ability to find most of our target bird species, it was agreed that there was little left to be desired in terms of what could have been observed and experienced. And, if you missed out this time around but would be interested in a future tour to Florida, stay tuned for information on future HMANA trips to south Florida.

HawkCount Now and Forever

How important is HawkCount.org to you? Do you enter data to HawkCount during the migration season? Do you use it to find local sites or to stay up to date with what’s been seen at watchsites in your region or across the continent? How about the site profile pages detailing site descriptions, history and directions. Or maybe you enjoy viewing the watchsite stats like record days, max season counts and timing tables. HawkCount has a lot to offer and we know it’s a valuable resource to the hawkwatching community. But this free service takes a lot of effort to maintain which is why HMANA has launched a fundraiser this fall to help maintain and improve the database.

HawkCount.org requires constant effort to physically maintain servers, develop and improve functionality, create and update content, transfer data from paper to electronic form, implement elaborate curatorial procedures for archiving, backing up and releasing existing data, and to enhance the reports that users can obtain from it, among many other tasks. Not all of this work can be done by volunteers and costs are incurred by HMANA to maintain and improve the system.

And so we’re asking for help from the raptor enthusiasts that use and rely on it, YOU! HawkCount.org is largely your site! HMANA provides the framework, but you and your fellow hawk watchers count the hawks, enter the data, and view the results. Without your
contributions and interest there would be no HawkCount.
There are two ways to donate to HawkCount. You can sponsor a watchsite’s profile page or you can make a flat donation. Please visit www.HawkCount.org for more details.
Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to Fund-raising Month in October! As of October 31, we have registered 26 site page sponsorships on 22 sites, and have raised over $3,000! This is a wonderful and welcome contribution to HawkCount costs and is much
appreciated.

Because we were off to a slow start at the beginning of October, we have extended “Fund-raising Month” until November 15 to give everyone extra time to help meet HawkCount’s immediate
fund-raising target of $5000. This includes keeping the Accipiter level sponsorships at the minimum $50 rate until November 15. After that, it will return to $100.

We hope you will help us reach our targets for HawkCount Fund-raising Month. Thank you for your support and for making the largest migration monitoring database in the world a success!