Well, the prediction I made at the beginning of the week (see previous post) wasn’t totally wrong. Today at Greenwich, we saw a total of 3302 Broad-winged Hawks! While not the 13000 of last year’s Sept 18th (in 3 hours), birds were moving all day long.
A close-in kettle at Quaker Ridge.
Plus, early in the morning we witnessed an incredible wave of dozens of warblers. We identified 15 species including Tennessee and 6 Blackburnian Warblers. The overall highlight of the morning passerines, however, was a Philadelphia Vireo. In the picture below, notice the dark lores (between beak and eye), and the bright yellow on the breast. A Warbling Vireo would have the brightest yellow on the sides, not the breast.
My lifer Philly Vireo! (Sorry, awful picture.)
The morning walk was from 7 to about 9, but around 8:30 low Broad-wings started appearing out in the valley and started flying over. This is very unusual because normally they aren’t seen until around 10. I would guess this had to do with 1) no clouds, meaning thermals formed faster, and 2) there were birds close by so it didn’t take long for them to reach us. By 10:30, however (we had seen about 400 at that point), the birds had gotten high enough that you couldn’t spot them without binoculars.
Mike, the official counter for the day, doing his best to get every bird counted (and making sure they weren't re-counted).
The rest of the day was spent frantically trying to find the kettles and streams of Broadwings that we knew were out there. The cloudless sky made it extremely difficult to pick out distant groups, and I would say we missed at least a thousand or so. Still, as multi-thousand-Broadwing days always are at the Watch, it was very exciting!
More kettles!
[…] Too tired to post anything about the event right now but thought I’d stick up this digiscoped picture of some weird Gyr/Saker/whatever cross falcon that was part of the show at the Hawk Watch Festival (maybe this digiscoping is growing on me!). More thoughts on the whole thing tomorrow once I can feel my brain again (quite numb at the moment!) Some more press coverage of the event (here and here) only a couple of minor inaccuracies involved! Fellow Hawk Watcher and blogger Ben posted his thoughts here. […]
[…] female Pine Warbler almost a colorless dingy brown and then a much sought after Philadelphia Vireo (photographed by Benjamin Van Doren here) along with a closely related but much more pedestrian (in the rareness stakes) Warbling. Here we […]