View September, 1997 cumulative spreadsheet
View August, 1997 cumulative spreadsheet
View day list of other species seen on 9-23-97 at
Hazel Bazemore NEW!
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Rpt Date: September 23, 1997
Site: Hazel Bazemore
County Park
Corpus Christi, Nueces County, TX
27 deg. 51.936"
97 deg. 38.560"
Reports: Patty Beasley (pbeasley@electrotex.com)
Counter: Joel Simon & Glenn Swartz
(Hawk Watch Int'l)
(site manned 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Aug 15-Nov 15)
Sponsors: Hawk Watch International
Support: Hawk Migration Association of
North America
Audubon Outdoor Club of Corpus Christi
Species
9/23 Season
Black vulture 0
51
Turkey vulture 0
1
Osprey
6 24
Swallow-tail kite 0 7
White-tail kite 0
1
Miss. kite
41 2,747
Northern harrier 3
9
Sharp-shin hawk 7
36
Cooper's hawk 0
33
Harris' hawk 0
1
Red-shoulder hawk 1 19
Broadwing hawk 1,832 40,383
Swainson's hawk 7
130
White-tail hawk 0
2
Red-tail hawk 0
3
Amer. kestrel 11
18
Merlin
1 5
Peregrine falcon 1
8
Unk accipiter 1
20
Unk. buteo
0 14
Unk. falcon 0
2
Unk. raptor 1
75
Total:
1,912 43,588
NOTES:
The hoped-for push of hawks backed up by the stalled front and ensuing floods of the Gulf low didn't happen today, but at least it wasn't a total washout. If this weather ever breaks, the floodgates of hawks will certainly open up. Come on, weekend push (I'm running out of vacation days to use during the week <g>!).
So, you might ask, what does one do to pass the time while waiting for those gazillions of hawks to fly by? Well, we've been coming up with Rules of Hawk-Watching, and anyone who wants to contribute, please email me and we'll add you to the upcoming web page of how to hawk and still keep (most of) your sanity. Today, we start with Rule #1 - Beasley's Axiom:
"It's a lot easier to keep record logs of birding counts when the record log book is NOT left on the bumper of the car to fall, then be driven over three times, then left out overnight in the rain. Rocks ground into the sheets make it hard to sort out those little field count marks from the caliche road material."
(If you still keep your logs the old-fashioned way (by (gasp!) writing the actual arabic number of birds seen), you may not have seen those little connect-the-dots-and-plug-in-an-X patterns that are used to count birds by the singles up to ten. Quite an interesting method. Must've been thought up by the same person who invented the straightjacket.)
Keep your heads up!
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Hazel Bazemore County Park has been the site of raptor migration
counts
since the 1970's. Beginning in 1990, the Hawk Migration Association
of
North America began conducting 10-day standardized counts for fall
raptor
migration. In 1997, Hawk Watch International sponsored the first
3-month
standardized count for the fall raptor migration. The tiny county
park was
once the best-kept raptor migration secret in the country, but
is rapidly
gaining recognition as the having the highest concentration of
migrating
raptors of any one location in the continental United States. Peak
fall
migration days bring well over 100,000 raptors in one day through
the
Nueces River basin and bluff located within the park boundaries.
Season
totals can run well over as high as half a million. Funneling actions
of
fall weather systems aid in the consolidation over the park of
migrating
raptors from both the Central and Eastern flyways, and on occasion,
we
suspect, some Western flyway incursions.
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To find Hazel Bazemore Park take FM624 west from SH77 for about
1 mile to
the road on the right with a park sign marking it. The park road
is just on
the west side of the water canal that crosses FM624. For more information,
see the Hazel
Bazemore page on the Audubon Outdoor Club web site.
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To go to the hawk watch site, go in the park entrance, make a left
as soon
as you get across the speed bump, and follow the winding road to
the crest
of the hill (past the restrooms, a covered picnic pavilion and
around the next bend).
Where the road makes a bend to the left is where we park, and sit
under the trees
(up against the 17th tee box to the golf course behind the park).
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