Saturday, 15 September 2012

Hawk Mountain Preserve

Well, Meriam found another wonderful “out of the way” place for us to visit. After we left Winterthur Friday afternoon, we traveled north into Pennsylvania about 60 miles to visit Hawk Mountain Preserve. This was somewhat out of our way to New York City, but what the heck?

We got up Saturday morning and drove about 20 miles to the Preserve. We realized this was a place of serious bird watchers when we began to see “no parking” signs along the roadway for at least one mile before the entrance. Fortunately we were there by 8:00a so we missed the subsequent crush of people and cars.

Hawk Mountain is a private sanctuary of over 2600 acres. It lies directly on the path of numerous migratory raptor birds. For several months each spring and fall, literally thousands of raptors birds fly over this preserve. The Hawk Mountain organization has built a number of permanent buildings (including a very nice visitor’s center) on the site. After paying a small entrance fee, we headed up the path to one of two lookouts.

One of the photographs below shows the various raptors spotted (and counted) at Hawk Mountain while another shows the daily, monthly and season totals of the various type of raptors spotted and counted. As you can imagine, the bird watchers who come here are REALLY dedicated. In fact, we discovered the organization has a number of foreign student interns in its program.

Meriam and I spent about two hours on the mountains. We spotted at least 8 Osprey, 30 broad winged hawks and 10 Kestrels and dozens of Turkey Vultures.

If you are a bird watcher, this is definitely a place to come.

Some of the “early birds” spotting raptors at around 8:00a.

One of the several Osprey we spotted.

Speaking of sighting a new and strange bird!

Display showing the “count” of the birds spotted. Note the number of broad wing hawks counted by 8:00a (22), the day before (1597) and so far this fall (4198). And this is just broad wind hawks.

Display showing all the various raptors spotted and counted at Hawk Mountain

Another Osprey.