The Westlake site is actually a couple acres of unimproved land belonging to a sympathetic landowner. The land is situated approximately 14 miles due west of the Hazel Bazemore County Park main watch site. Chosen for it's expansive northward/eastward view and for its elevation, the site was manned last fall for the first time in a series of three remote sites monitored during the peak passage period. Two of the three sites yielded good numbers of hawks, each having at least one day of 100,000+ hawks, but the other site was deemed to dangerous to man again, as it was located on a pull-off area of Farm-to-Market 624, a highway that has seen an exponential increase in traffic just since last fall. As you can see, we get a little of everything through the watch ... including mind-numbing periods of solitude where nothing is flying. What to do? We just whipped out our trusty bottles of bubbles and entertained ourselves until the hawks decided to fly again.

Excerpts from daily logs:

Wednesday, September 27: At Westlake (about 14 miles due west of the main watch site at Hazel), we tallied so many sandhill cranes (165) the first part of the morning before our major broadie flight that we dubbed ourselves the crane watch. The broadies came through first thing in the morning. Not a one more after 1pm, unless a bunch slipped in behind us after end of watch. Very likely, if Hazel's main site is any indication. A sharpie divebombed a redshouldered local four times for fun, and we also racked up 1049 white pelicans through the day. Day birds at Westlake included resident groovebilled anis, green jays, verdin, kiskadee, caracaras, Harris's hawks, etc. Five red-shouldered hawks refused to migrate; they just kind of hung around and took shots at each other and screamed off and on to alert intruders to their air space. Hundreds of turkey and black vultures, all resident to the nearby gravel pit area, alas, no obvious migrants there today. No wing tags, either. We're watching for them. Also saw one lone anhinga (go figure), Bewick's wrens, white-eyed vireo, Couch's kingbirds, many cave swallows; barn swallows. An immature chipping sparrow flew right to our watch canopies, perched in a tree, and when Bill started chipping to it, flew right at us, landing several feet away from Glenn's chair. It looked at us, we looked at it, Bill chipped some more and it flew first to a nearby scrub bush, then right back to Glenn. Bill chipped some more to it, and it flew to another scrub bush, then right at Bill. Don't know what Bill was saying to it, but it sure took a shine to he and Glenn. Dragonflies abounded. Only butterfly I recognized was a monarch or two. Blue, blue hazy skies burned everyone's eyes out; ice packs are the order of the evening.

Thursday, September 28: 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 (and turned us on to the use of amber-colored polarized glasses)!

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 when 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.