Hawk Watchers
September 11, 2007
Six years ago today, birders at the Montclair Hawk Watch weren’t looking up at the thousands of hawks that soar past this perch.
The group was looking east in horror, at the Manhattan skyline and the smoke and flames that engulfed a stricken World Trade Center.
The birders have conducted a quiet ceremony here on the anniversary ever since. But they also look up. If you join them in this stunning spot today, you might see one of the 783,770 birds of prey that have been counted migrating through here the last 25 years.
Seventeen raptor species have been spotted from the platform atop this 500-foot ridge on Edgecliff Road, from the red-tailed hawks that abound throughout New Jersey to the rare, ghost-like northern goshawks.
Even bald eagles. Last autumn the Montclair Hawk Watch set a new record: 125 of the huge birds between Sept. 1 and Thanksgiving.
But this site is famous in the world of birding because of the broad-winged hawk. An average of 4,348 have been spotted each year over the last five years. Nearly all arrive inside a window of two or three days on the third week of September. So it is possible to look up—binoculars help—and see a “kettle” of several dozen broad-wings rising up together like steam from a teapot.
Or several hundred? Thousands? On the single day of September 16, 1988, when the site was being dedicated in memory of Andrew Bihun, Jr., one of the Hawk Watch’s earliest record keepers, 17,420 broad-winged hawks flew by.
Why do they like this place? Because it makes migrating easier.
“Winds deflect off the ridge, which creates a cushion of air that birds use for lift,” says Bruce McWhorter, the New Jersey Audubon Society biologist in charge of this year’s count. Hawks swirl up the column of air above the hawk watch, then peel off south, he explains.
Else Greenstone and her husband Wayne, who have been coming here for nearly three decades, are the genial hosts who show newcomers the hawks. Else says your best shot to see a big flight is late this week, best on a day with northwesterly winds after a cold front has passed by.
“Migration has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years,” she says. “When we sit in the midst of millions of people, and we can look overhead and see a bird of prey, life is beautiful.”
The hawks fill the sky like tiny sparks of light and energy. And they glimmer against the backdrop of that dark day.
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