Keweenaw Raptor Survey

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