From Veracruz, Lab's director reports on hawk migration and more

John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, wrote to us about some of his encounters with ornithologists and birds during this year's North American Ornithological Conference in Veracruz, Mexico. The theme of the conference was "Wings Without Borders." For an account of Dr. Fitzpatrick's trip to see a "river of hawks," see the entry for October 5.

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

So far the meeting is a wonderful, bustling collage of people arriving from all over the western hemisphere, and governing boards of eight scientific societies busily assembling to take care of business sessions in advance of opening day. We're perched at the edge of the Caribbean, just south of downtown Veracruz but definitely still within its urban bustle. (Veracruz is Mexico's largest sea port, and one of the busiest in the world.)

It's humid and cloudy, with vaguely threatening thunderstorms holding at bay offshore. Brown Pelicans and Laughing Gulls fly along the beach near the hotel. Today several meeting-goers encountered a Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl being fussed over by Kiskadees and Social Flycatchers in a tree-lined garden near our hotel. And this morning as I was eating breakfast with Keith Bildstein (chief scientist for Hawk Mountain Bird Observatory) a beautiful male Hooded Warbler landed on the rim of a wicker chair several feet away from us. It hopped about on the chair tops for a bit, then flitted off toward the south. Quick stop to catch a breath, I suppose, then on to Belize.

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Today, Peter Dunn (no relation to Cape May Pete)--who studies Common Yellowthroats--was walking down the main hall where the sessions are held, and a female Common Yellowthroat came tumbling down from the rafters to his feet. He scooped it up, professionally but triumphantly, and showed it off to a number of us as we hustled toward the opening session. Then he took it outside and released it to carry on its way.

On a less happy ending, tonight after dinner a Whip-poor-will fluttered down out of the night sky and landed on the sidewalk as we walked back from dinner to the poster session. One of our party picked it up, and it died in his hands. End of the journey for this poor nightjar, probably fresh off a too-tough struggle to cross the western Gulf. Because its last few wingbeats brought it to the feet of an ornithologist, however, it will be preserved forever as a specimen in the Mexican National Museum.

The meetings got off to their formal start at 8:00 this morning with a brilliant plenary talk, a review of Mexico's birds and conservation challenges by Eduardo Santana. I spent the day in the symposium on Conservation of Birds in Mexico, organized by Eduardo Inigo. My talk is out of the way, so I can breathe easy now. Always nice to have your talk on Day 1 - the rest of the meeting feels so much more relaxed!


Thursday, October 5, 2006

Today was incredible. I've long held that one achieves "pinnacles of life" principally at those moments when you recognize during the moment itself that you will never forget it as long as you live. A number of us had one of these life-altering days today.

Steve Kelling (the Lab of Ornithology's director of Information Science) and Chris Wood (project co-leader of eBird) had decided that Thursday was the right day to leave the meeting and drive their van inland to see if the legendary Veracruz hawk migration was in force. I was delighted to tag along, having barely gotten outdoors for the last four days. Also in the van were Nicasio Vina and Freddy Santana (two of our eleven Cuban colleagues here at the meeting), Dick Hutto (University of Montana), Daniel Fink (a statistician working on the Avian Knowledge Network at the Lab), and Jon Bart (statistician-birder from USGS).

We drove to a nearby town, Cardel, where a hotel has agreed to cooperate with birders and convert its rooftop to a hawk-watching platform during the season. Hawks and vultures began to appear in numbers around 10:30. By 11:30 we were seeing large "kettles" forming far to the west, so we drove inland a few more kilometers.

Eventually we got underneath the still-growing stream of hawks, and my jaw began to drop. There were scattered hawks low and high everywhere. More amazing, occasionally in view at one time were 1,000 or more raptors, circling in tight, roiling vortices on rising air, then steadily streaming off the top of these kettles on fixed wings streaming like bullets toward the south, creating steady bands of hawks a few hundred meters wide and many stretching out a kilometer or more.

As the heat of the day approached, the numbers grew and these individual streams began to merge. By 1:00 P.M. we found ourselves under the most awe-inspiring bird migration spectacle I have ever witnessed. At one point, birds were passing overhead at the rate of 500+ per minute, and this steady line of "birds on a mission" stretched northward and southward as far as we could see through binoculars!!

It hit me all of a sudden that this phrase we'd been hearing --"river of hawks"--is no cute, marketing expression. It is the literal truth. We were standing underneath a genuine river of birds--not a stream or a brook but a true river--flowing steadily southward, all these individual birds bound for South America. At its densest points, where clouds of birds were taking advantage of columns of rapidly rising air, these hawks through binoculars looked like gnats in a swarm. Occasionally we'd spot a huge swirling swarm of Wood Storks, or White Pelicans, or Anhingas traveling in parallel with all the hawks and vultures.

Over and over again I pinched myself, dried an eye, and trained off northward to check and confirm the unbelievable notion that this river was indeed unbroken. The river actually braided, from time to time, with a new "channel" forming a kilometer or two west of east of us. When it did this, we would jump in the van and drive to be near it. But there was never a break in the steady southward drumbeat.

There were hundreds to thousands of hawks visible at any moment, continuously from about 12:30 until we had to leave, around 3:30 P.M. The river's greatest flow rate was between 1:00 and 2:00. By 3:30, as we were leaving, the rate had diminished to about 70 hawks per minute. But it continued steady as we drove away.

We tried our best to do counts of the birds within reasonable sight of us, but it's very difficult. By the time we left we had conservatively logged about 53,000 birds, though all of us agreed that the true number of birds passing was probably two to three times that number. I personally would guess that the total number of birds that moved by Veracruz today between dawn and dusk probably exceeds 200,000. The huge mass of birds was made up mainly of Broad-winged Hawks (~78%) and Turkey Vultures (~13%). The rest consisted of a potpourri of species that kept our interest high and lively, with new surprises appearing so regularly it was genuinely painful to break away finally and get back to the meeting.

Steve Kelling kept the official log, to be entered into eBird. Here is the list: