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Nikon and The Brevard Nature Alliance present the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival Brevard Community College, Titusville Campus 1311 North U.S. Highway 1, Titusville January 24 - 28, 2007 -- Titusville, Florida A celebration of birds and wildlife. |
October 5, 2006-Veracruz, Mexico
Today was incredible. I've long held that "pinnacles of life" are those moments when you recognize while an event is unfolding that you will never forget it as long as you live. We had one of these life-altering days today.
Steve Kelling (the Lab of Ornithology's director of Information Science) and Chris Wood (project co-leader of eBird) decided that Thursday was the right day to take a break from the North American Ornithological Conference we were attending and drive their van inland to see if the legendary Veracruz hawk migration was in force. I was delighted to tag along with them and several other colleagues, having barely gotten outdoors for the last four days.
We drove to a nearby town, Cardel, where-thanks to the Mexican conservation group Pronatura-a hotel has converted its rooftop to a hawk-watching platform. Hawks and vultures began to appear in numbers around 10:30 a.m. By 11:30 we were seeing large "kettles" forming far to the west, so we drove inland a few more kilometers.
Eventually we got underneath the still-growing stream of hawks, and my jaw began to drop. There were scattered hawks low and high everywhere. More amazing, occasionally in view at one time were 1,000 or more raptors, circling in tight, roiling vortices on rising air, then steadily streaming off the top of these kettles toward the south on fixed wings, creating steady bands of hawks a few hundred meters wide and stretching out a kilometer or more.
As the heat of the day approached, the numbers grew and these streams began to merge. By 1:00 p.m. we found ourselves under the most awe-inspiring bird migration spectacle I have ever witnessed. At one point, birds were passing overhead at the rate of 600 to 1,000 per minute, and this steady line of "birds on a mission" stretched northward and southward as far as we could see through binoculars!
It hit me all of a sudden that this phrase we'd been hearing-"river of hawks"-is no cute, marketing expression. It is the literal truth. We were standing underneath a genuine river of birds-not a stream or a brook but a true river-flowing steadily southward, all these individual birds bound for South America. At its densest points, where thick clouds of birds were taking advantage of columns of rapidly rising air, these hawks through binoculars looked like gnats in a swarm. Occasionally we'd spot a huge swirl of Wood Storks, White Pelicans, or Anhingas, traveling amid all the hawks and vultures.
Over and over again I pinched myself, dried an eye, and trained my binoculars northward toward the source to confirm the staggering notion that this river was indeed unbroken. The river actually braided, from time to time, with a new "channel" forming a kilometer or two west or east of us. When it did this, we would jump in the van and drive to be under it. But indeed, there was never a break in the steady southward drumbeat.
Hundreds to thousands of hawks were visible at any moment, from about 12:30 until we had to leave, around 3:30 p.m. The river's greatest flow rate was between 1:00 and 2:00. By 3:30, as we were leaving, the rate had diminished to 70-100 hawks per minute. But it continued steadily as we drove away.
We tried our best to count the birds within reasonable sight of us, but it was very difficult. By the time we left we had conservatively logged about 53,000 birds, though all of us agreed that probably two to three times that number had actually passed. Indeed, we learned later that the expert hawk-counters logged more than 193,000 birds passing by Veracruz today between dawn and dusk. The huge mass of birds today was made up of Broad-winged Hawks (~75%), Turkey Vultures (~18%), and Swainson's Hawks (~5%). The rest consisted of a 20-species potpourri that kept our interest high and lively, with new surprises appearing so regularly it was genuinely painful to break away finally and get back to the meeting. This is a spectacle worthy of many return visits, and one that I wish every soul on the planet could experience.
John W. Fitzpatrick, Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director
For a complete list of the day's birds, visit www.ebird.org/content/news/Veracruz.html.
Reprinted with permission from BirdScope, newsletter of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.Keynote Address: January 28, 3:00pm-4:15pm: Fox Lake Park Pavilion; $10.00