Birding Western Mass: Hawkwatching, Water
Thoughts on Birding from the Quabbin to the Berkshires
Hawkwatching should be a holiday like the Twelve Days of Christmas. Scroll down for musing but read the top for practical advice.
Study Up
Hawk identification during their long travels from north to south is difficult and I will not waste your time with the claim that I have mastered the details of it.
What I have gotten better at is numbering the details as I watch the birds kite south from the horizon. Such skill is certainly within your ken (if you don’t already have it) and holding it to you and then out from you is all you need to enjoy a hawkwatching moment.
Here are some things you can remember to look for:
At a great distance:
Are there many hawks that look the same in shape and attitude in a flock? If so, the majority may well be broad-winged hawks, which travel in flocks this time of year. When the number is greater than, say, six, then I have never seen that many of the same hawks that are not broad-wingeds. Such a flock is possible and, for all I know, frequent, but I haven’t seen it. When I see a bunch of hawks together, I generally assume many or most or all are broad-wingeds.
Are the hawks soaring in a spiral that carries them upward? If so, then, again, there’s a good chance they are broad-wingeds. It’s not guaranteed. Lots of birds of prey will gather on a good thermal and work it together.
How are these two things above deceptive? I am deceived by vultures at a distance. They also gather in flocks; they also ride thermals aloft in spirals. As my mother says, ain’t nothing simple.
In the studying department, then, look to the angle where the wings meet the body. When you see a shallow “v,” and when all the birds have that shallow “v,” I think there’s a better chance you’re looking at vultures.
At a middle distance, turkey vultures’ pink heads are diagnostic, which means “if you see pink heads, they’re vultures.”
Black vultures’ white “wrists” are almost diagnostic, which means, if you see white wrists on a bunch of birds soaring in a spiral, the chances are really good that you’re looking at black vultures.
As they approach:
When the bird of prey you’re watching gets closer, here are quick things to look for:
Head patterns / visual facts:
White head (and tail) = bald eagle.
Sideburns = more likely to be a falcon.
Big as a crow? peregrine
Big as a blue jay? kestrel
brownish / darkish face, faint sideburns but blue jay-sized = more likely to be a merlin
white rump = more likely to be a harrier, whether body is gray or brownish BUT
alternatively, could be a goshawk, which would be really cool, but I’ve never seen one on a hawkwatch here, so I got nothing for you except to say, think harrier first, and if skeptical, Google goshawk but approach the possibility with the greatest possible self-criticism
banded tail = more likely to be a broadwing BUT
sometimes it’s a merlin, which is way smaller and way faster and is more likely to whip past, flapping
Pale underside, no banded tail — likely to be a red-tail. Look for the tail’s sort of salmon shade; it won’t be vivid scarlet.
Overflight
Going to hilltops and mountaintops and towers to turn your gaze north in the hope of hawks is an act of fellowship and ritual that deserves your attention.
I went hawkwatching three times in the last two weeks. Some people do so much more — a gentleman I ran into last year has returned to Shatterack for many years; I had the good fortune to return and see him this year.
At Goat Peak, the work brought me above the canopy. (I featured Goat Peak as an especially good place to be at canopy during migration earlier this year.) It’s oak and maple forest, with some pines.
Above the leaves is a distinct world. A matchstick-sized insect floated upward regularly from branch tips for no obvious purpose and so, presumably, for courtship. Dragonflies darted back and forth. A wood pewee, uncharacteristically silent, appeared at a hunting spot and then disappeared back into the green glow of light through leaves below.
Hawks are not the only migrants I saw. A brace of chimney swifts passed in silence. Monarchs fluttered past and a few dragonflies zipped south with the same determination as the falcons.
I have a good eye. That doesn’t mean my vision is better than yours or anyone’s. It means that I am sensitive to the dark ripple in the air above the horizon that says a hawk is there even when it is still far away.
When I was a little boy, and my parents would want me to be able to see a bird somewhere, they would pass me the aged and fragile binoculars. At first, when we were first doing this, they would say, “I am pointing; follow my finger.” But then we learned that it made more sense to say, “Can you see the tree here? Begin with the trunk. Go up. Go to the third branch on the left -- no, your other left -- and then out to that dead leaf. The bird is there.”
On a hawkwatch, one says, “Start at the water tower, then go to 2 o’clock (because we still use clock faces for direction, because they work, even if we don’t look at clocks any more), then go two glasses away.” Each glass is a measurement of degree distance.
The hawks you see this way are applying the intellect of their wings and expertise of their eyes to travel as far as possible as fast as possible because they must get where they are going in time to survive the time that is our winter and then return.
One has the sense from reading about successful hawkwatches that it is always a spectacle of nature. It sometimes is. On a good day you might see many hundreds, even thousands, of hawks. Sometimes they will go directly overhead or even past you at eye level. When I was in Texas last spring, we saw thousands at one time, in a great massive swarm like a teeming thunderhead, and were sore afraid.
The waves of hawks that ripple through our air are following winds and currents we cannot see but which they must be able to feel as subtly as a biker feels slopes in hilly terrain. The fact that the air’s resistance or force is temporary and variable must make them geniuses of propulsion. Soaring, I imagine, is not coasting, but working with the same sure focus of a surfer in a wave’s forceful curl.
But they aren’t always beyond number. When I was on Shatterack for an hour today I saw a single kestrel. The day before on Goat Peak I had a few kestrels and some harriers and a merlin. Nevertheless, the sense that we know what they are doing — that they are southbound, that they have a purpose, that they may even know that purpose, frame it in their mind narrowly, and pursue it with initiative — this is an astounding thing to see, much more than a count of birds in a given species.
There is majesty in this urgent mandate — even when only two wings are giving it shape.
Focus
Watching hawks forces a birder to consider many different ways of understanding a bird they can barely see. You have to talk about it. When I was on Shatterack this weekend, I saw a hawk so far away that it might have been a pinprick in the sky at the horizon. While I watched a second pinprick appeared to approach it and there was a flare of white like a fleck of mica catching sunlight. I mentioned this to Tom, who is much more experienced than I am, and he immediately guessed 'red-tailed hawk.
We talked it through —
Red-tails have the lighter undersides.
They are much more likely to be “mobbed” by other birds, who will perceive them as an existential threat more than an ephemeral one, as red-tails are resident here all year. When a bird is mobbed, it may alter its path and its underside will flare in the light.
The fleck did not continue south.
So, good chance it was a red-tail. Talking through field marks, perceptions, behaviors leads to better ID — but I think, more important, it also leads to a better sense of the bird and how we fit it into the system of understanding that we have of the landscape and its inhabitants.
Birdscape
Shatterack peak and view site is a short walk from where you park on Russell Road. The road is rugged — it’s steep and I’d rather not try it in mud. It closes in winter. My AWD car does fine on it, but there’s plenty of times when I stop to roll slow. That said, the mountain has a hard rock face (slippery when wet, I daresay) and grants an absurdly beautiful view over the northern mountains. On the other side of the Mount Tom Range from the Connecticut, the place feels more remote (because it is).