Nature Done Wright

By Jim Wright

Special to The Record

    Last month, I wrote about a medical condition known as raptor fever — an affliction caused by the insatiable desire to watch raptors as they migrate through our region each fall. 

    I predicted, "The biggest migration will peak any day now when thousands of broad-winged hawks (the smaller cousins of red-tailed hawks) are on the move.”

   Then I crossed my fingers. What if they came through the day before the column or took a different route southward?

    As it turned out, my timing could not have been better — almost. 

    Sept. 15, the day my column ran was also my first stint as a raptor counter at State Line Hawk Watch this autumn. By half-past noon, the start of my shift, more than 150 broad-wings had already soared past. 

    That's when things really heated up – beginning with a bald eagle that flew so near the hawk watch I looked it in the eye. Next came an up-close osprey with a fish in its talons.

   Then the migrating broad-wings started arriving, and in increasingly astounding numbers. All the while, at least eight hawk-watchers kept track of various parts of the sky and constantly relayed their latest results to me so often that I felt like an accountant on the floor of the old New York Stock Exchange. 

   The afternoon reached a crescendo between 3 and 4 p.m. with more than 1,200 migrating hawks –  an average of one hawk every three seconds for the entire hour.  The day’s total was the second-largest in the hawk watch’s two-decade history. Yowza.

   For more than 15 years, I've visited hawk watches in hopes of witnessing this sort of red-letter day, but my timing always stunk. I was either a day early or a day late, or the broad-wings chose another flight path. The best I ever mustered: 600 raptors in an entire day. Not bad, but not jaw-dropping.

  Then came Sept.15. By the end of my shift, I'd scribbled down so many tabulations as the raptors flew past during that final hour that I had trouble adding up all the numbers. I drove home exhausted but ecstatic.   

    Such days are few and far between. While we should rightly mourn the global declines of bird populations over recent decades, we must celebrate nature’s daily miracles.

    I love this quote from Scott Weidensaul (from his book “Living on the Wind”): “Migratory birds bind up the corners of this increasingly fragmented globe – uniting the poles and the tropics, forests and deserts, wilderness and cities. A planet that sustains them will sustain us; their fate is our fate.”

  P.S. The day after my column, the hawk watch tallied another 3,300 broad-wings, and I wasn't there. Now, I fear, my raptor fever is incurable. 

The Bird Watcher column appears every other Thursday. Email Jim at celeryfarm@gmail.com.