A Sky Full of Hawks: NOW!
REQUIREMENTS: A comfortable lawn chair and an hour of your time
I will keep this short, since this topic needs to be up on the visible horizon THIS WEEK: The hawk migration is underway over the southern Appalachians.
If you’ve never seed a “kettle” of broadwing hawks before, you’re not dead yet. Pay attention!
A kettle is an invisible cauldron of rising warm air, in which multiple dozens of hawks simply let the buoyant atmosphere lift them a thousand feet to the top of the kettle. From there, they launch west and south, without effort, sailing for miles, until they feel the lift of their next rising elevator to the top.
From our back porch, we see “The Saddle” on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which, while not one of the big-name hawk-watching sites, sees its share of unofficial hawk (and dragonfly) watchers this time of September.
Parenthetically, dragonfly migration is one of those topics that got away from me this year. The Green Darners natural history is amazing. Check this link:
Three generations, 1,000s of miles: Scientists unlock mystery of a dragonfly's migration
Further north, on Afton Mountain above Charlottesville, is Rockfish Gap–which has the largest flight of broadwings on the Atlantic flyway. In the fall of 2020, more than 29 thousand were counted by watchers at that location.
If you have any interest at all (and I find a disappointingly small number of people do) then start by reading the first link below (noting in that article the picture of a hawk “kettle”) and go from there to the specific site tallies being actively maintained in the eastern US.
Counting Hawks » Appalachian Voices
HawkCount : Count data & site profiles for over 300 Hawkwatch sites
Dragonfly migration was pretty darn amazing too.
29,000 hawks; that is incredible!