And they are off!

Clickers - Catherine Hamilton

It's started! Southbound migration. Here in Los Angeles those tiny terrors: Rufous Hummingbirds are back and bullying all and sundry at the feeders as they make their way south for the winter. Down along the LA River and out in the desert beyond the San Gabriel Mountains, shorebirds, terns and swallows are starting to pile up at the usual watery oases. Though just a trickle of landbirds so far, we aren't so far removed from the migrant flood.

Though most 'Fall' watches won't start up for a couple of weeks yet it was exciting to see the first flight of raptors reported on Hawkcount from Congaree Bluffs, SC (report here). It always seems weird to me to talk about Fall migration when most of my non-birding friends are still in the middle of their beach season. Of course in reality some birds are on the move most of the year and it always amuses me to think that while many hawkwatch sites are tallying southbound migration, up at the Braddock Bay Hawkwatch in NY (home of the HMANA Raptor ID Workshop) they are counting the northbound push of post breeding dispersal along the Great Lakes (read about the phenomenon here).

Red-tailed Hawk - Luke Tiller

Reading that report from South Carolina I find myself imagining the excitement of seeing those initial couple of migrant raptors breaking over the horizon, as well as enjoying the other soaring birds like Wood Storks and Anhingas as they float by. I wonder if I am the only one out there that gets a vicarious thrill from looking at the day's reports in Hawkcount and reading through the highs and lows of other peoples days out hawkwatching? Being in the Los Angeles Basin means that there is little in the way of any visual migration of raptors, or anything else for that matter, so being able to scan through the reports in the evening is about as close as I get.

I start with sites that I know well: either ones I have counted at or that I have visited. That way you know what you've missed by being miles away, or maybe just stuck in the office all day. As well as keeping up with known sites I also just enjoy looking through and reading the reports, appreciating the descriptions of the flights, the humor of the counters or even just sympathizing with the frustrations of a seasons developments. The real highlight for me though is to look at those sites with mind-boggling flights in Texas, Mexico and Panama and try to imagine the panic, joy and insanity a day with two million raptors might cause (Hawkcount report for Cerro Ancon, Panama here).

Braddock Bay Hawkwatchers - Luke Tiller

Am I alone in this? Or are there other online hawkwatchers enjoying the seasons flight from the comfort of their own office? Of course I have to say that being there for the flights would be better, but when you can't, at least for me, there is always Hawkcount! Maybe I should start a hawkwatchers anonymous for those of us deprived of the real thing by location, work or whatever else in life is getting in the way?

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

Nocturnal Raptorwatching

As time permits, I’ve been reading Don Scott’s The Hen Harrier: In the Shadow of the Slemish, a very accessible book about the author’s studies of Hen Harrier Circus cyaneus in Northern Ireland.  While many experts no longer consider the eurasian Hen Harrier to be conspecific with our Northern Harrier C. hudsonius (most published sources on this side of the moat still regard it a subspecies of C. cyaneus, but see: Simmons 2000), I think the book would be enjoyed by most North American readers.  While the author often comes back to the topic of harrier pairs tree nesting in Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis stands in County Antrim, which is remarkable in itself, I found myself intrigued by the supporting evidence he offered that Hen Harrier might also hunt nocturnally.  The owl-like “facial disk” most harrier species are known for suddenly seems to take on a literal significance.

 

It’s not news to many of you that many “diurnal” raptor species have been observed migrating well after nightfall.  Osprey, in particular, are renowned for making nocturnal journeys even over the Gulf of Mexico.  Northern Harrier and Peregrine Falcon are also known to be nocturnal transients with some regularity.  And, drawing from my own experience, an evening “moonwatching” party with colleagues overseas last September proved particularly fruitful when we observed a Common Kestrel Falco tinnunculus and a Montagu’s/Pallid Harrier(*1) flutter purposefully southbound somewhere between us and a nearly full moon.  We were astonished.  In any case, it’s probably not surprising that the nocturnal habits of many of our diurnal raptor species are not particularly well-studied, and I can’t help but feel that the nocturnal ecology even in our own backyards is almost as much a frontier for field ornithology in some respects as any exotic locale in the world.  (*1: It is not always possible to reliably separate Montagu’s Harrier C.  pygargus and Pallid Harrier C. macrourus in the field.  Even in broad daylight.)

Partly inspired by my experience overseas, and to try to work with (rather than against) a sleeping rhythm “disorder” I’ve had for much of my life, I decided to see how I could leverage my nocturnal proclivities and enjoy birdwatching at times of day when most people are tucked in their beds, drooling into a pillow.  This really isn’t as insane as it probably sounds.  Apart from owls, songbirds migrate predominantly at night, and the nightjars and many seabird species are known to be far livelier when the sun is far below the horizon than when it is above it.  Granted, you can’t use many of the same strategies for watching/counting birds at night that you can in daytime, but there’s still an awful lot you can do!  A neat first step into the realm of nocturnal birdwatching is to leverage the pioneering work in bioacoustics done by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and build yourself a simple microphone in a re-purposed flowerpot, using it to listen to the call “signatures” of migrating songbirds.  During peak periods, this can be a great deal of fun; and it can also be very humbling, as you soon realize how many birds are flying over your head that you can’t easily put a name to (zeep?).  But put up a pot of tea and give it a spin, listening to the microphone "live" using a pair of headphones while relaxing in bed or your favorite easy-chair.  It’s a surprisingly nice way to “kill” an evening!

My second-hand Baigish 6 NV binocular.  It's lighter than it looks!

But for me, the vintage Russian military GEN2 nightvision unit that arrived in the mail two weeks ago might be the real "game changer."  Nightvision units (sometimes erroneously called “starlight scopes," and not to be confused with thermal imagers) are highly sensitive optical instruments designed to greatly amplify low levels of ambient lighting, enabling you to effectively “see in the dark.”  Looking through an old nightvision (NV) binocular is not like looking through a good daytime binocular.  If you’ve ever seen Gulf War-era news footage of Baghad airstrikes at night (a grim recall, sorry about that!), then you already have a pretty good idea of what to expect: the view through these is grainy, starkly monochromatic with a tendency toward oversaturation, and virtually absent of color apart from a green cast.  NV technology has advanced a lot in twenty years, but for someone new to nocturnal birding with not a lot of discretionary income for these kinds of purchases, even a Soviet-era design opens up an entirely new world!  While animals still have the firm advantage at night, any NV unit kicks wildlife observation up a few notches: surveying a pond at night, you can see sleeping ducks, swimming muskrats, and you stand a good chance of detecting whatever else might be asleep or poking about near the water's edge.  If you know a couple common roosting areas for vultures in daytime, this is a good way to find out how many might be staying the night.  If you’re visiting local grassland preserves (as I plan to be doing this week) you now have the capability to check whether the wintering Northern Harrier reported earlier in the day are hunting nocturnally as you make your rounds.  (I'll definitely report back should I observe this!)  There are a lot of possibilities, although if it isn't apparent by now, NV is no panacea; it has very definite strengths and weaknesses.

I’ll also mention that when I go birdwatching in the evening, I now usually bring my NV unit and my normal daytime 7X binocular.  The reason is that most daytime binoculars are not only superior to NV units in terms of magnification, field of view, resolution, and (most obviously) color rendition, but they still “capture” more light than the naked eye and therefore often yield better views in the dark than you might expect.  Using the two binoculars in turns can be surprisingly effective: use your daytime glass to take in everything that you are able to see of your surroundings, then use the NV unit to fill in the remaining “dark spaces” that you couldn’t resolve with your day glass.  With snow on the ground, when under bright moonlight, or under overcast skies reflecting light pollution from a nearby town (or any combination of these three!), the utility of having both glasses only improves.

In closing, a good day of raptorwatching doesn't have to end.  At all.  In fact, with a good NV glass, when you decide to stop watching raptors is now entirely up to you (or at least up to your internal clock).  I suspect the real "trick" behind nocturnal raptorwatching (and nocturnal birdwatching, generally) is simply breaking out of diurnal thinking that tends to preclude curiosity about nocturnal bird behavior.  Where feasible, try to borrow methodology and utilize technological advances from other disciplines.  If nothing else, you now have even more excuse to make mischief all hours of the day.

Good Hawkwatching,
Arthur

Literature Cited

Scott D.  2010.  The Hen Harrier: In the Shadow of the Slemish.  Whittles Publishing.

Simmons R.  2000.  Harriers of the World: Their Behaviour and Ecology.  Oxford University Press.

Another Classification of Birdwatcher

Photo Courtesy of Bert Willaert

In the introductory pages to his Field Guide to the Birds of North America, Ken Kaufman draws a distinction between birdwatchers and birders, offering some of the defining characteristics that make birders different than "garden variety" birdwatchers.  I've never been particularly fond of this distinction, largely because I feel it is prone to misinterpretation.  Promoting the birder as a kind of "elite" birdwatcher unnecessarily fractures a community with a common interest (i.e., birds and their conservation), and I do not feel this was Kaufman's intention at all.  But having spent much time afield with birders of all stripes at raptor migration sites both in North America and abroad, I'm inclined to suggest that there might exist another distinction that separates birders and migration counters.  Admittedly, the distinction is rarely clean: while there are birders who do not consider themselves migration counters and migration counters who rarely watch birds at all when not at their favorite migration site, most individuals blur the line and retain a more balanced interest.  But when working with groups of observers at migration sites, I feel the difference in focus between birders and migration counters often comes to the fore, and the distinction may be worth keeping in mind.

Birders who are not migration counters are the easiest to identify.  They are the ones who have a tendency to "filter out" common countable species when plumbing the skies for "special" birds.  For them, the common species are not so important.  While this is understandable given their peculiar focus, this can be frustrating for true migration counters whose defining responsibility is to offer a balanced coverage effort for all countable species, not just ones that should happen to strike the fancy of the legion of birders lining the platform.  More times than I can count, I've watched birders "helping" with the count effort turn their back on large areas of sky for extended periods of time to focus their scopes on a single distant harrier or falcon as one "not-so-special" raptor after another passed by in areas they left without coverage.  This can be frustrating for a true migration counter, who often finds his or her count effort directed by where the 10-15 scopes on the platform are not directed.  At its worst, a migration counter can feel screwed out of some satisfactory views of "good" birds as the birders' attention flit from one small spot in the sky to another without a second thought about what might be transpiring elsewhere.  So despite plentiful talent on the platform, the migration counter can find his or her count effort surprisingly lonely.

I choose this example not to berate birders so much as to help outline what I believe are fundamental "cultural" differences between birders and migration counters, because it is often assumed that everyone volunteering at a hawkwatch has the same objectives in mind.  And it is similarly assumed that good birders are, by implication, good migration counters, and I feel this is not always the case.  If you are a birder helping with a count effort, make a point to give the entire sky balanced coverage, or at least let the counter know before you ignore a large section of sky.  If you are a watchsite coordinator, identifying counters and volunteers who are partial to the objective of balanced count coverage will pay off with higher quality data in the long haul.

Good Hawkwatching,
Arthur

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

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!

NorthEast Hawk Migration Conference Saturday, April 2, 2011, in Holyoke, MA

The NorthEast Hawk Watch (NEHW) will hold its 9th Northeast Hawk Migration Conference in Holyoke, Mass., on Saturday April 2, 2011. Anyone with an interest in hawks is encouraged to attend. This is the 9^th conference organized by the NEHW since it was founded in 1971. NEHW held its first one-day conference on hawk migration in New England in 1978 and now organizes a regional conference every four years. This year’s conference was delayed a year so it did not conflict with the HMANA conference in Duluth last April.

The NorthEast Hawk Watch was originally founded as the New England Hawk Watch, to organize counts of migrating hawks over three weekends in the six New England states. Initially, the activity centered on western Connecticut and western Massachusetts, especially the Connecticut River Valley. Gradually, it spread throughout New England, and in 1991, it was expanded to the NorthEast Hawk Watch, including portions of eastern New York State and northern New Jersey.

The NEHW conferences offer a great opportunity for hawk watchers from across the northeast to get together to see presentations on what is happening with hawk migration in the region and talk with other hawk watchers. The conferences regularly draw attendees from as far away as southern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ontario! Many attendees stay over Saturday night to bird hot spots in western Mass. and Connecticut on Sunday, before departing for home.

The program for the 2011 conference includes presentations on

• The Decline of the American Kestrel in the Northeast by Larry Fischer
• The Nesting American Kestrels of Manhattan Island by Robert DeCandido
• Stopover Ecology of Migrating Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s Hawks in the Central Appalachians by Laurie Goodrich
• Lazy Circles – An Approach to Counting Turkey Vultures in the Northeast U.S. by Arthur Green
• The Hazards of Hawk Watching by Susan Fogleman
• Mt. Peter – The Longest Running, All-Volunteer Fall Hawk Watch In The Country by Judith Cinquina
• Scenes from the BP Oil Disaster by Shawn Carey
• An extensive live birds-of-prey program by Wingmasters (Julie Anne Collier & Jim Parks)
• And More....

The conference will be held at Holyoke Community College in Holyoke, Mass., from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For complete information on the conference, including registration, information on the speakers, directions, accommodations, and more, visit <http://www.battaly.com/nehw/conference>

The first forty registrants will receive a free one-page hawk calendar at the conference!

(Photo courtesy of Joseph Kennedy. All rights reserved.)

Letting the Day Come to You

There are a host of reasons for spending a day or many days at a hawk watch. Many of those are readily perceived and understood: the excitement of thousands of Broad-winged Hawks in the sky at one time, a good look at a migrating Golden Eagle and the first Osprey of the season.

Underlying these fairly accessible pleasures are some other, perhaps more profound but usually subliminal reasons for what we do. One of these has to do, I think, with simply letting the day come to you.

In a way that's almost oriental and meditative, hawk watching entails patience and a willingness to allow the passage of time and the movements of a discrete day to unfold without aggressively trying to influence what happens in it. This letting go while still paying close attention to temperature, wind direction, cloud cover, visibility and other movements of the day returns to us a connectedness to the natural world that's rare in most of our lives. I think it's this feeling of connectedness, in this way and others, that calls us to the hawk watch, even when the wind is in the east and the hawks are spread out and few.