Hello from The Hill! It's Thursday, September 28, 2000.

Sit down, grab yourself a cold drink and put your feet up. You're gonna be here awhile. As you may or may not know, two sites are in operation this week for the Hazel Bazemore Hawk Watch. The main site, of course, and in a repeat of last year's remote site experiment, we're running one remote site, the westernmost site from last fall, 14 miles due west of Hazel's main site. We saw good migration numbers at that site last fall, and decided it was our best bet for one remote site this fall. Since last Saturday, the site has been in operation. It's been moderate to agonizingly slow. Until today.

First, the main Hazel Bazemore HW site:

Turkey vulture - 1
Osprey - 3
Miss kite - 1
Northern harrier - 1
Sharpshinned hawk - 15
Cooper's hawk - 10
Broadwinged hawks 38,457
Swainson's hawk - 7
Red-tailed hawk - 1
American kestrel - 8
Peregrine falcon - 1
Unid Accip - 16
Unid Falcon - 3
Unid Raptor - 17

Total - 38,541

Butterflies, etc.: Fiery Skipper, Monarch - 1, Pipevine Swallowtail, White Peacock
Other birds: Verdin, Nashville Warbler, American White Pelican - 900+, Anhinga - ~550

At Hazel Bazemore main, while Thom ran the Celebration of Flight with Joel, Scott and Beth manned the watch. An unremarkable liftoff turned into a good early morning five figure flight ... then hawks dribbled through for the rest of the day. The Westlake site fared somewhat better today. Liftoff began nearly the moment we had the site set up. At the end of the first two hours, we were at 26,000+ hawks. What followed then were five solid hours of mind-numbing nothingness ... cloudless blue skies with the weirdest cast of haze and pall that any of us had ever seen blanketed the watch sites until mid-afternoon and made us crazy trying to spot any movement in the goop. Bless polarized sunglasses ... we honestly would have missed a huge number of birds without them. David Oslovsky came back out to lend a hand in the morning, bless him; he found good flights for us!

At 3:38pm, debris starts to rain down on us from clear blue hazy skies above ... at first we thought we were getting pelted by feathers. White long objects kept appearing and falling down around us ... we had massive numbers of white pelicans today, and thought something must be plucking them up above ...strangest thing we'd ever seen. Chased down a few strands, and discovered the feather-like objects were really corn/sorghum plant husks ... where in the world did those come from? Hadn't a clue, unless some vortex picked them up. Little did we know ...

until ... 4:43pm, when a good sized south Texas dust devil blew right on top of us without warning, nearly blowing over our canopies, overturning some chairs, and nearly dislodging one of the counters. We managed to keep everything from blowing into the next county. Even saved the chocolate (what was left of it after the day's munchie attacks). We were trying to decide if this was a hint from providence ... we decided to ignore it. Smart move. After a handful of birds that trickled through virtually one by one all afternoon, we finally got an accipiter overhead that turned into a kestrel for one counter and into a peregrine for the third counter. You know how that conversation goes ... "Accipiter!" "Falcon!" "Peregrine!" "Are you crazy?! That's not a peregrine!" "Are you both nuts? That's not a falcon!! It's obviously an accipiter!" "WHAT are you talking about?!" ... until the final a chorus of "Ohhhhh's!!!" rang out and we all finally peeled our binos off our faces, and realized we'd all three been looking at three different birds going three different directions. By this time, we're truly feeling in the Twilight Zone of hawk watching. As our regular watch close time of 5pm drew near, and after yesterday's many late kettles sighted until 7pm at the main Hazel Bazemore site ... Bill and Glenn and I opted to take a chance and stick around a bit ... to see what developed. Are we ever glad we did.

At 5:41pm local time, the skies at Westlake opened up and then fell in, right on top of us. A huge kettle of broadwinged hawks broke out overhead in the clear blue ozony skies ... literally directly overhead before we could even see them. They broke out and kettled just until we could finally see them, then took off hard for the south. The kettle turned into a stream, and we tracked them until we could no longer see them. 34,000 broadies by hour's end ... not bad for fifteen minutes' work. Resting a moment ... we wondered if any would come back for a set down. A few minutes later ... those guys were nearly forgotten as the rest of the sky opened up and suddenly, broadwings covered the sky ceiling overhead ... breaking out into a huge river of hawks that boiled and flowed and overran us for the next 22 minutes. And then ... they started falling. Set down! Big time set down ... from 6 to 6:23pm, local time, over 78,000 more broadies came over in a massive river, then thousands started falling out of the sky all around us, looking for a place to sleep the night. We finally quit counting them, as broadies began circling back on the site ... we just sat back and watched the fun and cheered them on until they were all down by 7pm! Watching broadies find a night roost is akin to watching a jet aircraft crash into the trees ... broadies don't land gently, they stoop and free fall to their roosting spot; pulling up at the last moment before total annihilation into the roost trees. Fascinating! After an entire day with no visitors to our remote site, John and Nancy O'Neill (sp?) of Alabama pulled up ... just in time to witness the freefalls. And got a lifer bird, the roadrunner, on the road leading to the site, no less. Talk about timing! Just before the final few birds crashed in ... the only two Mississippi kites of the day casually sailed nearby, looking for their own roost. Of the rivers of broadies, we recorded 3 dark morphs.

Okay, you've been good; I know you've already scanned below, but here now are the numbers for the Westlake remote site:

Miss kite 2
Northern harrier 1
Sharpshinned hawk 9
Cooper's hawk 2
Redshouldered hawk 1
Broadwinged hawk 138,218 (incl. 3 dark morphs)
Swainson's hawk 1
Red-tailed hawk 1
American kestrel 7
Merlin 1
Peregrine falcon 1
Unid accip 4
Unid buteo 1
Unid raptor 1
Remote site total: 138, 250

In addition, we tallied up 10,102 white pelicans, 1 woodstork, 3 roseate spoonbills, 6 white-faced ibis, 4 white-tailed kites (could have been some of the same individuals; they're non-migratory here), 210 anhingas, some monarch butterflies, tons of dragonflies of all colors and configurations; along with the usual suspects: groove-billed anis, green jays, kiskadees, etc.

It's late; you've been good sports to read this, and I'm headed to the fridge for ice packs for my eyes, then to bed. Tomorrow's liftoff promises to be a good one. We're going back to the site tomorrow morning just to watch, then to Hazel main for the Celebration of Flight. There are many more broadies yet to come. See you out there!
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Fall 2000 hawk watch crew: watch coordinator, Joel Simon (email: jsimon@electrotex.com); counters Jo Creglow, Scott Rush, Beth Hahn; and education director Thom Benedict. Plus a cast of many, many volunteers, whose help over the years is so gratefully appreciated!
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The Hazel Bazemore Hawk Watch appreciates the many volunteers and supporters that have helped bring the watch into the forefront of migration studies. Thanks to Electrotex, Inc. for sponsoring our web site; Hawk Watch International for their on-going support and sponsorship of the watch efforts. Also to the Northwest Business Association; Central and South West Services, Inc./Central Power and Light; Nature's Bird Center; Margaret Cullinan Wray Charitable Trust; the Trull Foundation; and the Audubon Outdoor Club of Corpus Christi.
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Hazel Bazemore County Park is in western Nueces County, Texas, west of the central Gulf Coast city of Corpus Christi. To find it, take FM624 west from SH77 for about 1 mile to the road on the right with a park sign marking it (past a Dollar Store and cancer treatment center, on the right). The park road is just on the west side of the water canal that crosses FM624. Across the street is a car wash. Turn north and take the park road; go one half mile to the park entrance gate. To reach the fall hawk watching spot, take 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, start looking for a place to park. Watch times: 8:30am-5:00pm, Texas time.
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Cheers from your roving hawk watch reporter,
Patty Beasley, Corpus Christi, TX
Email: pbeasley@electrotex.com
Web: http://www.electrotex.com/aoc/