It's Time to Head South

   August 15th marked the start of the fall migration count at Hawk Mountain. As of August 28th, 121 Broadwings have passed over North Lookout. The month of September will be an exciting time for us as it is peak migration for Broadwings heading south. We anxiously await a good flight day in mid-September, hoping to witness a large kettle of Broadwings overhead, possibly with one of the telemetered birds. When we are not spending time at the lookout, we will be conducting data analyses from the past two field seasons as well as dedicating days to trapping Broadwings at the Little Gap banding station. We hope to  affix an additional two to four transmitters on migrating birds this September, putting the total transmitters deployed in this study to 10 or 12.
   If you have not already checked out our movement maps on Hawk Mountain's website, click the link to get daily movements of the newly tagged birds from 2015. Sadie, adult female from Silver Lake (Delaware State Forest) and Ridgena, adult female from Game Lands 106 (Hawk Mountain) have both left Pennsylvania. We anticipate Pocono Penny, adult female from Stoney Acres (Delaware State Forest) and Rachel Carson, adult female from Mud Pond (Delaware State Forest) will start moving south within the next two weeks.

   We are interested to see the comparisons and differences between the birds from 2014 and 2015. Dates of departure, arrival, migration pathway, stopover and roost sites will all be examined and compared with data from 2014. From the data thus far, we can see that Ridgena, Sadie and Abbo have all traveled through the large, contiguous forest along the Appalachian Mountain chain in West Virginia and Virginia.

Table 1. Dates each of the 2014 tagged birds departed their nesting grounds, started migration, left Pennsylvania and were south of Texas.

Bird ID	Depart Nesting Area	Begin Migration	Out of PA	South of TX
Abbo	18- Jul to 23- Jul	29-Aug	3-Sep	30-Sep
Kit	17-Aug to 19 -Aug	27-Aug	29-Aug	-
America	15- Aug to 17- Aug	28-Aug	1-Sep	1-Oct
Hawkeye	8- Aug to 12-Aug	27-Aug	8-Sep	28-Sep

-          Kit stopped transmitting on 18 September 2014, near New River, south of Hinton, West Virginia.

-          America stopped transmitting on 22 November 2014, northeast of Kankintu, Panama.

-          Hawkeye stopped transmitting on 9 November 2014, in Reserva de la Biosfera La Sepultura, Chiapas, Mexico.

   We suspect America and Hawkeye may have wintered in these locations, though we cannot be certain without further signals. Be sure to check our Facebook page regularly for photos and video links from the summer and updates on our trapping of fall migrants and the latest locations of our migrating Broadwings. We are excited to dive into the data and see what the birds were eating this summer and how that compares to last summer and to analyze habitat use and many other features. Wherever you are Broad-winged Hawks may be passing overhead, so enjoy the migration and check our maps to see if the tagged birds are passing near your home!