The problem with that site was that Mount Vernon was immediately to our West, and some of the raptors flew behind it and were not seen further south, so we could not count them as migrants.
So, I looked at Google maps on Terrain view, to try to identify a spot that would be unobstructed, so we would not undercount actual migrants. It seemed to me that Lookout Mountain Road and especially Windy Gap Park could have some potential. We went to the parking lot and found that there was no view North because of Mount Zion's bulk. We then saw some stone steps going up the ridge, walked up to the top, and found what we had a totally unobstructed view all the way to Rocky Mountain National Park and a 360° view. This spot is immediately north of Lookout Mountain, and is not visible at all from Dinosaur Ridge.
Just because we think it's a good spot for migrant raptors doesn't mean that they would fly over us or even close to that spot as we know from Dinosaur Ridge in fall, so we came back the next day and observed for a few hours.
The problem with a new watch site is that we had no idea where the raptors would be seen – over us? (as we had at Hook Mountain in New York where we'd see dozens of Broad-winged Hawks just over the treetops which we could easily identify, not even needing binoculars), far to the West? Or East of us? Also, how high would they fly. We were already at 7156 feet, I expected migrant raptors to be similarly low as we had at Hook Mountain (where one year a Sharp-shinned Hawk flew between Liza and myself at our knee level!)
Our first raptor after 13 minutes was a Cooper's Hawk in the valley to our East, found by Liza without binoculars. I kept scanning systematically with binoculars far to the north and NW, and found 2 Red-tails far to the NW which flew to the SW ending up east of us. They glided really fast with no flaps except a twitch occasionally (such as broadwings do) so when I went to use my scope to positively identify them and aids them, and I couldn't find them, and looked at Liza, she was looking much much farther to the right of where I was looking! An advantage having more than one counter. I've never seen any raptors gliding so very fast at any hawk watch.
We saw a total of 24 migrant raptors in around 3 hours.
Cooper's Hawk 6
Red-tailed Hawk 9
American Kestrel 6
Swainson's Hawk 2
Turkey Vulture 1
Among non-migrant raptors, we did see 3 adult Golden Eagle, 2 of which flew over Lookout Mountain and we tabulated them as migrants, and a few minutes later Liza found them back over Lookout Mountain and flying north, so we removed them from account. We knew they were the same 2 GE because of their molt pattern – 1 had a missing right outer primary and many secondaries, the other had only missing secondaries. Another GE was harassed by a local Red Tail. We also saw 4 local Red-tails Hawks.
One interesting feature of the site is that we had winds constantly from the East for the hours we observed, in contrast with Dinosaur Ridge Hawk Watch in spring where the wind can be from any direction on any morning, keeps changing, eventually winding up coming from the East in the afternoon. This made it impossible to state definitively which winds were best for migration there.
All except 1 of the raptors was seen to our East, and that too fairly high and distant, most found by systematic binocular scanning. Only one Kestrel was found flying to our West, in the afternoon. Interestingly when I was scanning south of us, I caught sight of a male Kestrel in my binoculars, below our level, which we had not seen immediately to the east because of the projection of Mt. Zion, or further to the NE. We found 2 other kestrels following that route.
There were 6 paragliders lifting off from a small hillock NE of us – they like migrating raptors use thermals for lift, so it confirmed that we were at a good spot.
We have made this our definitive fall hawk watch site. We have a hawkcount.org page for the site, and all our sightings will be posted on COBirds. if you go to
https://www.hawkcount.org/siteinfo.php?rsite=968
you can see 3 images of the views we get from the site.
Ajit and Liza Antony
Central Park, Denver
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