Gray Ghost
The past week yielded a very large push of migrant Northern Harriers throughout the Northeast, with a sizable percentage of these birds being gray ghosts – adult males – like this one. The strong north and northwest winds following this current cold front should help many more migrants come through our area in the next few days. Will there be more southern and western November rarities with them? Probably, so keep an eye out for everything from the Swainson’s Hawk to the Townsend’s Warbler. Don’t forget we are only a couple weeks away from December 1 and the...
Read MoreMigrating Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus)
Here’s an adult Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus) that I recently photographed in the middle of migration, passing directly overhead from our hawk watching position. It is looking straight forward while powering down the coastline on a stiff northwest wind. Perhaps it will spend part of its journey or the winter using a bird feeder as a hunting area. While this may not be what many birders like to read these raptors are hungry birds, too. Young hawks have very high mortality rates and 8 or 9 out of 10 birds will die in their first year with migration, starvation and even...
Read MoreBoothe Park Hawk Watch 9/12 – 182 migrant raptors
We had a decent day at the Boothe Park Hawk Watch in Stratford, Connecticut yesterday, considering the deep blue sky in control, as we tallied 182 migrant raptors filling in the 9:30-4:30 time frame. Having no clouds in the sky makes it very difficult to spot hawks, eagles, falcons, vultures and so forth flying at altitudes in the thousands of feet. Light clouds, especially cirrus, provide a helpful backdrop to view them on without obscuring any or dumping precipitation which would stop the birds from moving south. In essence many migrants likely flew by right over our heads that we could...
Read MoreCold front coming
Normally I would love to see this low and cold front coming through in this manner in mid-September, as modeled on today’s 18z GFS for Thursday morning at 9AM, but the high subsequently moves into the Great Plains and the setup will not be as optimal as I would like for hawk migration. For the Northeast sites to really rock it should be centered over the Great Lakes, controlling winds at all levels and keeping them out of the northwest. We’ll see…Friday could still be interesting. But, so far this year, the winds have not cooperated. Perhaps it will be a huge second half of...
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