Record Broadwings

On Tuesday I was assigned to be at the South Lookout, counting whatever hawks were migrating past. Well soon after I arrived at the lookout at 9am I got a call from the other lookout that there was a huge Broad-winged Hawk migration under way. The sky looked something like the picture on the left for the next 2 hours. The first hour I counted 1500 Broadwinged Hawks flying over and then between 10 and 11 I counted 4000 Broadwings flying over! Hawk Mountain ended up with 7508 Broadwings for the day, the 5th highest count ever at Hawk Mountain and the highest in the last 25 years. It was what the original curator Maurice Broun would have called a red letter day. The biggest day on record was over 21,000 Broadwinged Hawks in one day.