Hi All, This weekend was the 2nd of our Hawk Cliff Open House events.
Saturday started off promising but the cloud cover rolled in and gave us about an hour of rain. Eventually the rain let up but the days flight was definitely impacted and the total count for Saturday was 453..mostly Sharpies and Kestrels. Sunday, on the other hand started off with lots of blue sky and patches of cloud and moderate NW winds...an absolutely perfect fall hawkwatching day....and the birds didn't disappoint. There were a pile of visitors today with cars lined up and down the Hawk Cliff Rd. The kettles of Broadwings started fairly early in the morning and stayed that way for several hours. Many of the kettles were directly overhead of the count area and some were being pushed out over Lake Erie.The total count for Sunday was 15,601 raptors of which 13, 551 were Broadwings! What's so surprising about today's count is that it was the FOURTH really great Broadwing flight (since last Tuesday)!! No one in our group can remember ever having 4 days of large Broadwing flights...it's usually all over in a couple of days with a few smaller flights as September comes to a close, Today's total will (once added into the Hawkcount database) bring out season total to 100,000+ raptors for 2010 so far...and we still have TV's, Redtails and Shoulders to go. The Sharpies were on the move again today with another excellent flight of 1,159 and the Kestrels were coming through in good numbers...often 10 or 15 at a time....with a total of 608, A couple of early Red-shouldered Hawks cruised by with the Broadwings...along with 122 Northern Harriers. Tomorrow (Monday looks promising with NE winds of 15 kph and lots of sunshine predicted. For directions and events (Doors Open Ontario - Elgin County Weekend Oct 2nd) check out the HCF website at the following link: http://www.ezlink.ca/~thebrowns/HawkCliff/hcf_directions.htm Good birding! Dave P.S. For those that are interested and emailed me regarding the incorrect Year-to-date totals on the Hawk Cliff reports for the 14th, 15th and 17th...it was due to my submitting them in reverse order....I had a some folks asking about getting the most recent numbers posted irst. The mechanism on Hawkcount will only add those counts up to and including the date of report...so when I submitted the 17th it didn't include the 14th or 15th big days because I hadn't entered them in yet...and so on. The HMANA data has now been entered for ALL Hawk Cliff counts up to the 17th. The 18th and 19th will go in tomorrow...got back too late tonight from the hawkwatch and too tired to do the data entry. _______________________________________________ ONTBIRDS is presented by the Ontario Field Ornithologists - the provincial birding organization. Send bird reports to ONTBIRDS mailing list [email protected] For information about ONTBIRDS visit http://www.ofo.ca/
