We are slightly understaffed at Mt. Pete this year, so I decided to take the opportunity of having the day off for Labor Day to go up and count again. It was a slow start, with poor conditions (a nearly all blue sky, making birds very difficult to locate). But as the day progressed, I got more clouds and more birds. I thought my highlight of the day was going to be a single Common Nighthawk that passed over the platform, very high in the sky. But, in the seventh hour of the watch, Tom Burke and Gail Benson joined me, and they brought along some Broad-winged Hawks with them. I had my first kettle of the season (42 birds), and tallied 72 BWHAs for the hour. In the end, I counted 106 migrating raptors; 95 of them were Broad-winged Hawks.
