The hawk count has finally come alive! The slowdown began the final week of March. It continued into the first week of April, when 47 hours of ceaseless searching yielded a meager total of 23 raptors. Nothing changed through the second week of April, aside from the weekend’s blizzard dumping a fresh two feet of snow, snowballing the start of the waterbird count and completely shuttering the hawk count for two days. After the storm came several days of blasting north winds; not a combination to encourage raptors to continue northward. Even the Red-breasted Nuthatches, who I could count on constantly visiting my sunflower seed feeder at the hawk deck on even the slowest of days last year, were conspicuously absent.
The first 18 days of April yielded a dismal total of just 130 raptors. The 19th saw a new season high count of a mere 31 birds of prey passing by. Then after nearly a month of virtually no visible migration, spending entire days shivering in
After a record-late arrival, Rough-legged Hawks like this dark morph individual have been seen at Whitefish Point lately. Photo by Gary Palmer.
the cold north wind for a single Bald Eagle, it all changed on the 20th. Finally the wind had turned around to the south for the first time in ages, and as I hoped, it brought scores of raptors with it. A new season high count of 55 Red-tailed Hawks was quickly hit. Midday, trying to mix in with his Buteo brethren, the first of season Rough-legged Hawk slipped in! And soon after, the first Northern Harrier for the count! And the Sharpies finally showed up too, with a dozen rolling by throughout the day. All three of these species arrived shockingly late this year — Rough-legged and Harrier were first seen a full week later than their previous record latest arrival.
With a total of 137 raptors on the 20th, surpassing the combined total from the first 18 days of April, the big push of migration was just beginning. Each of the next four days smashed the numbers recorded through the first three weeks of the month. A total of 299 on the 21st was followed by the current season high of 402, then 309, and 139 on the 24th before the wave of migrants once again ebbed. Most incredible was the run of Rough-legged Hawks — after their historically slow start, they surpassed last spring’s high tally of just 26 on three consecutive days, quickly going literally from zero to 100!
The strangest development may have been seeing the first Broad-winged Hawks that same weekend, just two days after the first Rough-legs and Harriers. A pair of Osprey nearly evaded detection on the 24th as they followed their favored route far over the lake, making their arrival the second-latest over the 40 year history of the WPBO hawk count. A single Peregrine Falcon, also the first of season, zipped through late on the 21st. This leaves Swainson’s and the now record-late Cooper’s Hawk as the only remaining regularly-occurring raptor species yet to arrive at the Point this year.
Of course raptors were not the only birds who found themselves at Whitefish Point thanks to the the long-awaited favorable conditions. Sharp-tailed Grouse, Common Loon, Double-crested Cormorant, Great Blue Heron, Killdeer, American Woodcock, Ring-billed Gull, Iceland Gull, Belted Kingfisher, Northern Flicker, Pileated Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Tree Swallow, Barn Swallow, Winter Wren, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Eastern Bluebird, Bohemian Waxwing, Pine and Myrtle Warblers, Myrtle, American Tree, Chipping, Fox, White-throated, Vesper, Savannah, and Song Sparrows, Eastern Meadowlark, Brown-headed Cowbird, Rusty Blackbird, Evening Grosbeak, and Purple Finch all made their first appearance over the same four day window as the humongous push of raptors. Finally, my long-awaited first-of-season Red-breasted Nuthatch ‘meep’-ed just within earshot a handful of times on the 24th, truly one of my favorite birds!
This chart from Dunkadoo tells the story of the season so far — a solid start in March followed by nearly a month of no significant migration before the next big spike!
