Keweenaw Raptor Survey

Today, June 15, marked the last day of the 2011 count at Brockway Mountain.  In a few days I’ll be returning to New York, and I’ll admit I’m not entirely looking forward to going back!  It has been a distinct pleasure for me to serve as this year’s counter at Brockway Mountain; what a privilege it has been to witness, firsthand, the spectrum of personality exhibited by one of the most beautiful places in Michigan over the course of an entire season!  And I’m equally blessed to have met so many warm, wonderful people, whose support and good company made my stay here in the mouth of the wolf pleasant and most comfortable.  (I honestly wish I could list them all here, and I feel remiss for not doing so!)

While the count is now officially over, this will not be my final post.  I will compile the results for the season and post them here for you shortly.  Please stay tuned!  And again, my heartfelt thanks to all of the new friends I made on and off the mountain this season!

With Fond Regards to you all from atop Brockway,
Arthur

May 1′s Sharp-shinned Hawk flight seemed to pick right up from April 30′s strong showing, but strangely, in the opposite direction!  Where we had 185 eastbound birds and only 13 westbound birds on Saturday,  Sunday brought only 30 eastbound birds and 131 westbound birds; that Sunday westbound count  is nearly 71% of the Saturday eastbound count!  Wow!  With brisk southerly winds both days pushing migrants of all stripes to the northern end of the peninsula, the traditional notion that these westbound birds are indeed many of the same birds observed flowing east past the watchsite earlier seems to hold true.  But without hard data to fall back on (e.g., that produced by other surveys conducted simultaneously in the peninsula), I can do nothing more than speculate.  Fascinating!

Wishing for better weather at Brockway,
Arthur

A bleak sky?  For sure!  Today, we spent the day shielding our eyes from the wind-blown particles of eroded conglomerate blown off the ridge face by nearly constant 35+ mph southeasterly winds.  My usually sturdy scope tripod was blown to the ground with ease, and it seemed as if I was routinely chasing down an article of clothing or making sure my clipboard wasn’t blown off the mountain.  Even after a shower, I’m still finding bitsies of stone in my hair.  Yes, this was an interesting day!

NWS forecasts suggested April 30 would have all the makings of an exceptional flight, and we came to work anticipating numerous “kettles” of Broad-winged Hawk high over our heads.  But birds particularly reliant on soaring flight were conspicuously absent in number today.  Those BWs would have none of these winds, and we were treated to trickle of only 15 birds that came in low over the treetops in ones and twos.  No kettles.

However, Sharp-shinned Hawk and other powered-fliers (including Peregrine Falcon) were out in force.  As cloud cover thickened and progressively invaded the sky, we were treated to a nearly constant movement of birds within easy unassisted view of West Bluff low in the valley between Brockway and Rocky Ridge.  This flight-line was probably a blessing in disguise; our binoculars were under the spell of an unyielding tremor from those winds, and not particularly useful for viewing at distance.  In any case, only a few daring fliers ventured any appreciable height above the treeline, and nearly all our observations were unexpected flybys that required constant vigilance.  No doubt we missed some birds without the benefit of our optics, but I think we did pretty good job under the circumstances to milk the day for what it was worth!  This was hardly anyone’s ideal spring hawkwatching day, and I’d like thank Karen Lund, in particular, for choosing to spend the day on the ridge with me in conditions that left us both temporarily hard of hearing and a little worn around the edges.  (I suspect we’ll both sleep well this evening!)

The final totals for this unusual day were: 37 Turkey Vulture, 2 Osprey, 9 Bald Eagle, 7 Northern Harrier, 185 Sharp-shinned Hawk, 1 Northern Goshawk, 15 Broad-winged Hawk, 6 Red-tailed Hawk, 10 Rough-legged Hawk, 17 American Kestrel, 4 Peregrine Falcon.

Is there a lesson to be learned in this?  Yes:  You’ve got to be totally nuts to be a hawk counter!  Fortunately, I already knew that, and I don’t mind being a little crazy so long as I’m having a heck of a lot of fun and making fine friends and memories.  How blessed I am to be in exactly that position right here in Copper Harbor!

With luck, maybe tomorrow (May 1) might bear witness to (much) friendlier weather and some of those BWs we were hoping for today.

Marveling at bleak skies over Brockway,
Arthur

Back at my old hawkwatch in New York, it’s often happened that I’ll point out a distant raptor to a visitor who’ll respond with rapt attention by fixing his field glass on a floating pepperspeck somewhere just off the horizon.  This sense of communion is always a joy for me, as I like nothing more than to share my passion for raptors and the mechanisms for their migration with people who rarely have the opportunity to witness this annual spectacle for themselves.  But sometimes this connection is abruptly severed when I put a very familiar name to a bird otherwise unidentifiable by plumage, and the other party will utter a dismissive ”Oh!” and promptly drop their binocular from that distant place where our bird was soaring effortlessly against a beautiful blue sky.  ”Just a Red-tail,” they mutter.  What?  ”Just a Red-tailed Hawk?!!” I want to desperately fire back, but I choose to bite my sun-chapped lips instead.

I think what annoys me about this comment is not that it comes from someone who probably observes (vultures aside) fewer than 25 raptors in the wild each year (i.e., far too few to be taking any raptor for granted!), but that cocooned within his attitude toward this “roadside” hawk is the view that the sheer conspicuousness of this beautiful and astonishingly adaptable bird somehow diminishes its uniqueness.  I’m sorry, but I cannot understand this!  No matter how much of a fixture they’ve become, even before taking the amazing life history of Buteo jamaicensis into consideration, this is a bird that appears to be running counter to the trend in many parts of this country in that it is actually thriving in lockstep with the march of human civilization rather than falling to its tarsi in the latter’s wake.  And it’s a damned graceful bird in the air, too!  And with each passing season I spend in the field watching hundreds of them, I realize more profoundly how little I really know about them.  ”Just” a Red-tailed Hawk?  Hah!  If that bird isn’t special just by virtue of being enmeshed in an ecological give-and-take so vast that it defies comprehension, then absolutely nothing anywhere is special.  Not those hawks, not us people.  Maybe I’m being simplistic and a tad harsh, but my sentiment is borne of my utter respect for these amazing creatures.  Surely I can’t be the only person who feels this way!

I got a little off-track, methinks, but as a hawk counter, I’ve been served a generous dollop of Red-tailed Hawk.  But it wasn’t until I came to Brockway Mountain that I stood a chance of seeing up to four subspecies/races of Red-tailed Hawk (i.e., B. j. borealis, B. j. calurus, B. j. kriderii, B. j. harlani) not including intergrades (birds that exhibit plumage traits of more than one subspecies), because in New York we’re apt to only ever see one race (B. j. borealis).  And today, April 21 at 9:51 EST, I saw my first dark morph adult “Western” Red-tailed Hawk (B. j. calurus) passing westbound directly overhead, which breaks the exclusive run of light morph “Eastern” birds (B. j. borealis) that I’ve seen so far this season at Brockway.  It was a beautiful bird, and one I almost didn’t scrutinize closely enough to determine what it was; only minutes before, there had been a dark morph adult male Rough-legged Hawk (incidentally, also soaring in tandem with a light morph adult “Eastern” Red-tailed Hawk), so seeing a dark buteo pass overhead didn’t initially raise any flags given the proximity of that roughie to the watchsite.  Lesson learned: give every bird you’ve already ID’d a second look if you’ve taken your eyes off of it!

A partially albinistic adult Red-tailed Hawk (Image by Joseph Youngman)

Barely any time elapsed since my observation of the dark “Western” bird when, at 10:24 EST, I was treated to an almost freakishly white bird cutting a path south in front of West Bluff: a partially albinistic adult Red-tailed Hawk.  Nearly all of the feathers covering this bird’s head, body, and wings were white as snow, contrasted only by the classic red tail, dark “belly band,” and a few scattered grey-black remiges.  Wow!  I’d seen otherwise normal-looking birds with a few white remiges (flight feathers) or retrices (tail feathers), but never anything like this! If it wasn’t already apparent, Red-tailed Hawk are hardly the “plain folk” that one notable hawk guide claims they are.

I’ll close my entry today with a simple request: if you don’t do this already, please make a daily ritual of trying to find the uniqueness in all the common things around you, because I suspect that’s where genuinely amazing things are hidden.

Gazing at birds and humans alike from atop Brockway,
Arthur