Date: Fri 27-Sep-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: DOTTIE

Quick Words:

Brody-hawks-migration

Full Text:

with cut: Hawk Migration Bypasses Newtown

B Y D OROTHY E VANS

Newtown naturalist and veteran hawk-watcher Polly Brody is still wringing her

hands over the final results of the broad-winged hawk migration over

Connecticut that ended last week.

She and her friends had kept a 12-day vigil from a Newtown hillside, hoping to

count more broad-winged hawks heading south to Central and South America for

the winter than they'd ever seen before.

Instead, they tallied the smallest number ever in the 18 years that she's been

a participant in the annual count.

"No more than 3,000 birds, total!" Ms Brody said with disgust Wednesday

morning.

"It was excruciatingly frustrating," she added, because the watchers had

waited through a rainy mid-week, September 17-19, and they knew Friday,

September 20, should be The Day.

When the weather cleared Friday morning, they were elated.

"We thought they'd all flying," she said, explaining it was late now in the

migration period, and the hawks wouldn't wait around any longer.

It turned out they were right. The hawks were flying in record numbers that

day. They just weren't doing it over Newtown.

Even though the wind was blowing in the "right direction," Ms Brody said (out

of the northwest), it was blowing too hard.

"Every hawk in New England must have jumped into the air those two days

(Friday and Saturday). They had their beaks pointed south but the wind was

blowing 25 miles an hour, so it set them to the east," she said.

"By the time they hit Massachusetts, they were already over Boston," she

groaned.

Hawks won't migrate over water, so they just "funneled down the coastline,"

she said, missing the Newtown watch point almost entirely.

"They counted 14,000 in Rye, 10,000 over Greenwich and thousands streaming

over Stamford. But the hawks never got inland of I-95," Ms Brody said.

Much as she and her group felt like jumping in their cars and driving down to

witness the spectacle they knew must be taking place along the coast, they

couldn't leave their post.

"Negative numbers are significant data, too," she explained.

But there were several high points to this year's watch, Ms Brody said.

"We had a good turnout [of watchers], we counted eight bald eagles and we saw

four red-shouldered hawks. We've never had more than one of those," she said.

Next year, hopefully, the wind won't blow so hard.