[cobirds] Mount Vernon Cemetery fall hawk watch at Matthews/Winters Park September 8, 2024

Having been a volunteer hawk counter at 3 different hawk watches in fall over almost 35 years in New York State (Mount Peter, Hook Mountain, and I-84 Hawk Watch) before moving to Denver in 2022, and finding on Hawkcount.org that my friend Gerhard Patsch just started his Bear Mountain Hawk Watch for the season last week, I wondered whether we could find migrating hawks in fall in Denver, where there is no official hawk watch in fall.

In 2022 we (my wife Liza and I) had attempted a fall hawk watch at Dinosaur Ridge with very few migrants seen between August and December.

A hawk watcher in Denver who has subsequently moved out of the area had told me of their attempts in 2018 and 2022 to tally information on fall raptor migration from Mount Vernon, which is the ridge immediately west of the Dinosaur Ridge Hawk Watch; so, Liza and I decided to go there today. We weren't sure where to observe from, so we walked along the Town Walk Trail, past the Mount Vernon Cemetery and realized that the trail further on led up into a valley just north of Mount Morrison where, though the location is higher, it would be visually blocked to the north by a ridge top, so we went back to the cemetery and observed from there at 6402 feet. This is only 0.6 miles from the parking lot, a lot lower than the Dinosaur Ridge Hawk Watch, and 0.5 miles directly west of that watch.

We had a total of 25 migrants between 9:20 AM and 12:45 PM. There were:

Red-tailed Hawk 8 (2 immatures, the rest not ageable)

American Kestrel 6 (1 adult male, 1 adult female, the rest not ageable)

Swainson's Hawk 6 (all adults except one),

Turkey Vulture 2,

Broad-winged Hawk adult 1,

Northern Harrier 1,

and 1 unidentifiable very distant buteo.

Most of the raptors flew over the ridge to the West, and at one point, 5 Swainson's Hawk visible at the same time; some raptors flew overhead and just to the East, and only 2 TV soared south directly over the Dinosaur Ridge Hawk Watch.

Non-migrant raptors included:

Golden Eagle adult 1, which was attacked by 2 Red-tails and was chased high into the sky for over 5 minutes by one of them,

Turkey Vulture 3,

American Kestrel 2 males,

and Red-tailed Hawk 5.

This was encouraging, so we thought of maintaining a migrant raptor watch at that location, which we would observe whenever we could, not daily, perhaps once or twice a week as we have other activities we are busily engaged in.

If anyone wants to learn how to identify migrating raptors in flight, you're welcome to join us, and if you would like to help us find raptors (you just need to be able to sight with the naked eye or binoculars as raptors are fairly distant here, and can easily be missed by us), send me a private email with your name, email address and/or your phone number so we can let you know when we plan to go there next time.

Ajit and Liza Antony

Central Park, Denver

--
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group.
To post to this group, send email to cobirds@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/cobirds
* All posts should be signed with the poster's full name and city. Include bird species and location in the subject line when appropriate.
* Join Colorado Field Ornithologists https://cobirds.org/membership/
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cobirds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cobirds/d2cdb0d1-0ea7-4b3c-b337-258a7248c42fn%40googlegroups.com.