April 17th, 2024
Broad-winged Bonanza!
““I’ve never seen anything like this. I usually consider seeing a couple thousand Broad-wingeds over the course of several hours a really good day at the Presque Isle Hawk Watch. Watching a couple thousand pass by in a matter of minutes was a thrilling experience that I won’t soon forget!””
““Wow! What a surprise! My only regret is that I didn’t get to the hawk watch 30 minutes earlier when all hell broke loose. The sky was full of Broad-wings when I arrived with and estimated 1500 birds in the air in three kettles and they were still coming. I estimated 7300 BWs in the first 30 minutes of the watch. Today was a record-breaking day for BWs. A man doing bird counts from the tower said they started pouring through around 1200 hrs. EST. He had already recorded twice as many birds before I arrived. With the strong south wind and approaching low pressure system birds were stacked up along the lake. After the 1300 hr. when more clouds moved in, the number of birds dropped significantly, but was still steady. Many Sharp-shins were mixed among them, but were difficult to sort out and count among the huge kettles of BWs. Highlight was a Golden Eagle passing high overhead.”
”
From high atop the observation tower at
the Tom Ridge Environmental Center,
EBO Morning Flight Monitor, Jason Bojczyk, reports:
“These are the days counters live for. The day started off with dark, low clouds, a drizzle, and a slow start, but blackbirds were starting to move at the end of the 2nd hour. They built nicely in the third hour before really pumping through in the 4th, 5th, and 6th hours. By far the dominant birds were females/immature males. The off/on rain had little to no effect on the blackbird flight. It's been rare this season, but 90% of the flight was low and right along the lakeshore. Other passerines were a tad more spread out, but everything was basically within 2/3 km of the lake. Raptors started moving nicely during the 11:00 hour (5th hour of the count) dominated by Sharpies and Kestrels, with only 7 Broad-wingeds and 30 Vultures from the start of the count until 13:00. That was fine though as Sharpies were having a great day, as were Kestrels.
Right ~13:00 it felt noticeably warmer (though it only increased 1C from the previous hour to 19C) it became sunny and brighter (though still mostly 90% cloud cover) and the winds switched from E/VAR/Swirling to SSE ~12:00 and S ~13:00. Broad-wingeds then immediately started to move and quite low. The first 5-10 minutes was just clicking them individually, but after 505 clicks, individual birds clicked switched to birds being clicked by 100. At this point everything raptor-wise just busted open and most species had their best hour of the day from 13:00-14:00. Every scan during the whole hour had 1/2 dozen or more species in it. Several thousand Broad-wingeds passed by low over the tower during this hour. Kettles and streams were everywhere in the distance, though fortunately, nothing was what I'd consider high. Hundreds of birds in single kettles were frequent, though there was such a conglomerate of streams and kettles that the most numerous kettle of the day probably was 'only' 4-500 individuals. While there was almost certainly some goodie(s) that got by, the focus was on attempting to keep kettles and streams not counted more than once. It would not surprise me if 3-5 Swainson's got by during this time. I only was able to go through perhaps 10-15 kettles thoroughly due to the volume of birds in such a condensed period. In fact, I wasn't even able to definitively pick out a dark morph Broad-winged. During this same period, at least 356 Vultures, 326 Sharpies, 54 Kestrels, 16 Cooper's and 7 Osprey went by. When all was streamed and done for the hour, 20,005 Broad-wingeds were tallied. I've had the fortune of counting raptors at a wide variety of places in the U.S., including more than the number of Broad-wingeds tallied today in a single day, but I have never had such a concentrated push of raptors in my life. So many birds were in the air at once that it was much more reminiscent of a peninsula counting site, not a ridge counting site.
As Broad-wingeds started winding down for the hour, Vultures drastically picked up and continued to be excellent for the next 2.5 hours. Sharpies and Kestrels had an excellent flight until ~16:00 and the count drastically diminished after ~16:30. 25 minutes later the wind started coming off the lake from the N and felt cold. Afterwards the flight didn't have much going on and blackbirds had hardly a movement at all before the front finally hit at 19:45 with heavy rain.
More analysis to be done on the weather setup for this movement at the end of the season, but generally speaking, winds (mostly 600m+) were an ideal SW from Tennessee to NW Ohio, along with warm temperatures. Winds were W at this altitude all across Illinois and Indiana right up to the western edge of Lake Erie. Rain/thunderstorms were right in this area (NW Ohio border with Lake Erie) all morning moving east. NW of and behind this was a major low pressure system. Instead of heading up Michigan, which was significantly closer, Broad-wingeds were pushed/elected to move Northeast along the lakefront riding the warmer thermals, and still favorable winds, east of here. All in all it was a super enjoyable day of migration, with great views, and the best raptor day, let alone hour, that I've ever had in the spring.”
Totals: 67099 individuals, 52 species, 13:10 hours
For Jason’s full report: https://www.trektellen.org/count/view/3594/20240417
Jason Bojczyk counting Broad-wingeds on 4/17/24 by Katie Andersen