Wow, what a day. I got out a little bit early to do some birding before heading up to Mount Peter to count hawks. My first stop was Glenmere Lake; I wasn’t there for more than 30 seconds when a GREATER WHITE-FRONTED GOOSE swam into my binocular view. I put the word out and then headed over to Wickham Lake, where I was able to locate (3) SURF SCOTERS. Again, I put the word out, but unfortunately the birds flew not long after I first saw them. Before I left to head up to the mountain, I saw an interesting bird fly in and land on the lake. It was a Brant! I was hoping for Brant to flyover at Mt. Peter today, but I wasn’t expecting to see one land.
At Mount Peter we had a fantastic flight. Kyle Knapp visited for a little while early, and then Travis Rubio and Jeanne Cimorelli joined me a little bit later and were a great help. For the day we tallied a total of 627 migrating raptors. Over 450 of them were Turkey Vultures – they just seemed to be streaming through non-stop all day long. Other highlights included good numbers for many species: we had 22 Bald Eagles, 10 Northern Harriers, 89 Sharp-shinned Hawks, and 15 Red-shouldered Hawks. Non-raptor activity was pretty exciting too. We had over 70 skeins of Canada Geese fly over; we counted over 2,300 individuals! We had a single skein of Brant, and a couple of Common Loons fly over as well. It was a long, cold, windy day up on the mountain, but it was very rewarding. As usual, I’ve included my Hawkcount.org report at the bottom of this post.
