Ghosts of a Chance

I do much of my spring hawk watching on Plum Island, at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in Massachusetts, where the stars are potentially hundreds of kestrels and maybe a dozen or more Merlins on a great flight day. Under optimal conditions, the birds are low, moving up the barrier beach, and providing spectacular views. Despite standing merely two or three feet above sea level, you are able to look down on dozens, occasionally hundreds, of falcons slicing into the wind (not all at once)!

However, most of the time, you are looking for a handful of individuals per day. Winds from the north or east are essentially the kiss of death. On sunny days with warm southwest winds, individual hawks may be soaring high into a clear blue sky and even pass unnoticed. If they are discovered, they are often classified in the same category as “noseeums.” Not rewarding to say the least. If the southwest winds aren’t very strong, a bone-chilling sea breeze kicks in, so you in your winter coat and gloves are looking at nothing while five miles inland people are working in their yards or gardens in t-shirts and shorts. The past two days with warm but weak southwest winds, counters had a total of 4 birds in about 8 hours. Even though we can’t see the water on the other side of the dunes, at least we did have several adult gannets right on the beach.

At Plum, we pray for strong, gusty winds somewhere out of the west, preferably west or northwest. It pushes birds towards the coast and keeps them low on the barrier beach. A good day has dozens of kestrels and handfuls of Merlins, while a great day can produce hundreds of kestrels and dozens of Merlins. Wednesday, April 8 proved to be one of the best hawk days I’ve ever had on the island. Over 390 hawks, including at least 306 kestrels, 10 Merlins, 2 Peregrines, a Bald Eagle, and 56 Northern Harriers.

I love harriers, one of my favorite hawks, but this flight was incredible. We had at least 28 adult males and 21 adult females, with 7 immature or unaged birds, and we had a feeling we were missing some birds going over the marsh low in the distance. Almost all these birds were on the deck, only several feet off the ground, and usually passing within 30-50 yards. I’ve never seen so many adult males in one day, or adult females, and so well. Normally, you don’t see the fine vermiculation on the adult males, but this day it was evident on almost every one, and the subtle shades of gray defy description. The females stood out for their mature, grayish brown backs and the notable streaking on their upper breasts. Several were the most grizzly grayish females I've ever seen. I saw more varied adult plumages, and more clearly, than I ever have seen before. (This likely is a state record count of Northern Harriers from my initial search, but a little more digging must be done to be sure.)

The kestrels alone would have made for a spectacular day, but the Gray Ghosts were just incredible. It is a bit sobering to have been hawk watching for almost forty years and realize that you have never seen anything close to this for one of your favorite species, and you are unlikely to ever do so again. I have just a ghost of a chance....


Photo courtesy of Joseph Kennedy. Used with permission.

Kittatinny Roundtable

On Saturday I attended the 2010 Kittatinny Roundtable at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, a really fun day that I always look forward to. Could anything be better on a sweltering midsummer day than sitting in cool surroundings with a group of hawkwatchers talking about the 2009 hawk migration season?

Hosted by Hawk Mountain and newly-minted PhD. Laurie Goodrich, their senior monitoring biologist, this year hawk counters came from as far away as Allegheny Front hawkwatch in the west to the northern New Jersey sites in the east. I think Picatinny Peak had to drive the farthest but I didn’t do the math on that. In any event, counters from Rose Tree Park, Scotts Mountain, Montclair, Bake Oven Knob, Hawk Mountain, Waggoners Gap, Jacks Mountain and Militia Hill were also there.

The format of the roundtable discussion is that for selected species we look at the peak migration day of the season and the total season count for that species. Was the peak day earlier or later than usual? Who got the big Broad-winged Hawk flight? Did one site have a terrible result but the neighboring site do well? How did weather impact this past season? How do the results look when compared with previous years? The discussions help to provide a more regional perspective on the past season than is possible when only looking at results from a single site.

A few sites claimed “bragging rights” this time around. Militia Hill near Philadelphia tallied more Broad-winged Hawks for the season than any other eastern site with their 13,436 and 7600 on their big day. Allegheny Front posted more Golden Eagles than any other eastern site with 204. The 2009 season turned out to be a bit lackluster for most of the sites. Nothing looked disastrous, with even the American Kestrel posting numbers a bit higher than we’ve seen over the past few years. The Bald Eagle and Peregrine Falcon are major successes virtually everywhere. Overall, the seasonal numbers looked about average, perhaps a tad below average, but only a tad.

But even a lackluster migration season can’t dampen the enthusiasm when you put all those hawkwatchers and counters in the same room for a day. It’s not often that we get a chance to get together and talk about hawks all day with other hawkwatchers, and that alone is well worth the drive.

Taking it to the Edge

What a woman, that Rosalie Edge! Mrs. Charles Noel Edge, as she was known among her contemporaries, was not intimidated by anyone when it came to acting on her conscience. She honed her skills in battle when she joined the women’s suffrage movement. She learned to write powerfully and persuasively – in pamphlets, in letters to politicians, to newspapers. Later she took on powerful entities who claimed to be conservationists but mostly acted in their own self interest. We all know that were it not for her untiring efforts the hawks we study today might not have safe passage past our lookouts. But without her many other endeavors on behalf of our environment, the world would be a very different place.

Many of the battles Mrs. Edge undertook and won, need to be fought again today. In a 1935 Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC) publication, Fighting the Good Fight: Program for Conservation Advance in Five Years, she wrote that “beaches were defiled with oil and dead and dying birds.” Yes, that was 75 years ago! We can only imagine her reaction to the current situation in the Gulf of Mexico. Would that this fearless woman were here to take on BP and those more interested in lining their pockets than in maintaining healthy ecosystems. We need a 21st Century Rosalie!

I have learned so much about this intriguing woman who inspired Rachel Carson, among others, by reading Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy (2009 University of Georgia Press), by Dyana Furmansky. I encourage anyone who cares about our incredible planet to read this eye-opening and well-written book.

photo from www.hawkmtn.org/history

New North American Hawk Silhouette Guide Available Free

The Hawk Migration Association of North America (HMANA) has published a new silhouette Guide to Hawks Seen in North America. This new, 2-pp, black-and-white guide features soaring silhouettes and key field marks of 21 migratory hawks regularly seen in most of North America. The artwork is by Paul Carrier, who developed the silhouette Guide to Hawks Seen in the North East two years ago.

This new guide is a significant revision and expansion of that guide, adding Mississippi Kite, Ferruginous Hawk, Prairie Falcon, and adult male Northern Harrier, as well as other new images and additional field marks. The guide can be downloaded and printed free of charge for personal, noncommercial use by visiting www.hmana.org . The guide has also been professionally printed on heavy, glossy card stock and laminated for all-weather use in the field. Individual laminated copies cost $5 plus $1 postage and handling.

Hawk watches, bird clubs, schools, nature shops, or any other organization can raise funds and help educate their constituents about hawk identification by purchasing the guide in bulk quantity at wholesale prices. For complete information, including bulk pricing, and to order or download the new guide, visit www.hmana.org

The HMANA web site also offers a lot of information on hawk identification and migration, including a new guide to books and online resources on hawk identification and migration, as well as the popular Guide to Hawks Seen in the North East and the free PowerPoint presentation, Identification of Raptors of the Northeast. These valuable hawk identification aids can all be downloaded free of charge.

Pepperspecks and the Visibility of Hawks

It was a mezzo mezzo Broad-winged Hawk migration at Wachusett Mountain in Princeton, Massachusetts, this fall. The numbers were less than half our long-term average and about three quarters of the average for the past ten years.

Compounding the disappointment, many of the broadwings were pepperspecks, so high in the sky that some people thought we were counting floaters in our eyes. How high were these pepperspecks? In Flight Strategies of Migrating Hawks (1989) Paul Kerlinger says that at Cape May, NJ, broadwings were difficult to see with the naked eye when 625 meters, or roughly 2000 feet, directly overhead against a cloudless sky. Broadwings were generally seen with the naked eye below 550 m (1800 ft) but somewhat difficult to see beyond that. When using 7X binoculars, single broadwings directly overhead were difficult to detect at 1,100 m (3600 ft). Kerlinger notes that in Texas flocks of hundreds of broadwings observed on radar could be missed by observers with binoculars when the hawks were flying less than 1600 ft above ground level about a mile from the observers.

Today I was hawk watching at Lighthouse Point in New Haven, Connecticut, one of my favorite sites for looking at accipiters and falcons. It is a great site to see and compare Sharp-shinned Hawks with Cooper’s Hawks, and today I was trying to photograph them, with limited success. I was in a parking lot between two small woodlots, somewhat sheltered from a 10-13 mph northwest wind gusting to 22 mph. Early on, the birds were low, often just above treetop levels, but they gradually worked their way up in late morning to the limits of unaided vision.

Occasionally, they would stack up, soaring and hanging into the wind. One time, I had 8 Sharp-shinned Hawks stacked up in a single column from the treetops to the limits of unaided vision. It looked like the skies over Kennedy airport early on a Monday morning, but these air travelers weren’t looking to land. They were trying to decide if they wanted to fly 5-7 miles over the bay in that wind, or circumnavigate the bay. Kerlinger says that sharpies become difficult to see against cloudless skies between 400-500 meters (1300-1600 ft.) overhead and disappeared above 700 m. (2300 ft).

Later in the day when I had given up all hope of photography because of the birds’ altitude, one of the excellent observers at Lighthouse would find a sharpshin or kestrel flying at the limits of naked vision. When one bird was found, we would often find another half dozen birds in the immediate area, once our eyes could focus on something. On one occasion I found a Peregrine rowing across the sky almost directly overhead, beyond unaided vision and approaching the limits of binocular vision. While directing other observers to the Peregrine, I discovered two more following in an almost direct line at the same altitude, which suggests these broadwing-sized birds were probably around 3600 ft. high.

A number of factors that I have not addressed affect the visibility of hawks. Several books and articles published in the '80s addressed the issue to an extent, but I’ve not seen much done “recently.” Is anyone aware of “visibility studies” done at a hawk watch near them?