HawkCount and Local Hawk Watches

I’m blissfully sunburned after about as beautiful a day as you can possibly get on the south shore of Lake Erie in March. We saw nice runs of Red-shouldered Hawks and Red-tailed Hawks, with a few great looks at Bald Eagles and other raptors thrown in for good measure.

As the Ripley Hawk Watch’s official counter, I’ve just completed entering our data for March 18th in http://www.hawkcount.org/. We only had six people at the watch today, but I know we have dozens, maybe hundreds, that follow our days by going to HawkCount on the internet.

If you haven’t visited HawkCount recently, go there and look at the expanded site profiles affiliates have developed with the help of HMANA staff. Notice also the expanded species information for reporting sites: HawkCount now includes graphic representation of migration peaks and duration for recorded species at each raptor watch.

I especially appreciate the way HawkCount presents polished and professional reports based on the data we enter daily. These reports reinforce the local message we try to get out that our monitoring of the migration is an important conservation activity, is disciplined, and constitutes a significant contribution to scientific knowledge about important resources.

If you aren’t already a regular user of HawkCount, check it out!