Hawks

Every mid-September, the Environmental Science classes take a field trip to Mendota Fire Tower to count the hawks as they migrate.

Hawks Make Return

Written by Caitlin Sullivan, published on September 21, 2010, from SWVAToday.com

Each morning this month [September], Tom Hunter has packed his lunch, chair, gear, and water and climbed up Clinch Mountain to the Mendota Fire Tower. Once on top he settles in, faces northeast, looks to the sky and waits. He waits and peers and waits and peers, scanning the sky through binoculars for tiny black dots. He waits out showers, if they're just passing through, spending more than eight hours each day on the knob. Then, at around 5:30pm, he gathers his belongings and heads back down the mountain, collecting trash on his way.

"There has been somebody up here counting hawks each September for 50 years," he said last Friday. "This ridge here is like a funnel." It's mostly broad-winged hawks that pass overhead. In an effort to conserve energy during their long southbound migration the hawks use rising warm air known as thermal as to carry them. The hawks follow the Appalachian chain. Using columns of warm air they soar up to 3,000 feet and then sail down the ridgeline sometimes as much as 10 miles before rising again up another thermal.

"The hawks travel about 160 to 200 miles a day and go as far south as Brazil," Hunter said. A major gathering ground for broad-winged hawks is Veracruz, Mexico. He said about 1.5 to 2 million hawks arrive there each year.

"We've got two in this big cloud and one here at about 2 o'clock," he said pointing to the sky. It's quiet, the wind blows through the trees and the handful of other birdwatchers on the knob look up. Hunter checks his watch and marks his sightings in a small notebook. The Mendota Fire Tower Hawk Watch is a citizen science project sponsored by the Bristol Bird Club. Hunter provides his records to the Hawk Migration Association of North America, and organization that provides public access to the database.

"It's a scientific study helping to preserve birds," Hunter said. "It's a way of keeping track of the population. It's something I can do to help." By tracking the population, researchers will notice when a population drops, an indication of greater environmental factors.

Hunter said he can get eye strain sometimes by looking through the binoculars all day long but it's worth it. "I'm interested in nature itself but for some reason birds are fascinating," he said. "Broad-winged hawks are very small creatures that travel great distances."

Hunter's only spent three full days this month alone atop the mountain. "Most of the time there's at least one person here for a while," he said. Rob Biller was one who joined Hunter last Friday. Every September for 15 years Biller has made the trek up to the spot. He said at first it was a challenge to learn how to identify birds and then as he learned more he wanted to go to more places and test his skills. "It's an addiction," Biller said. "Your blood pressure changes."

Most visitors come from within a 50-mile radius, although this year there's been birdwatchers at the fire tower from Ohio and North Carolina as well. "This little place is probably not known to 5 percent of the population around here," said Ken Turner, another observer on the knob last Friday.

There is a hawk watch location near Roanoke on the Blue Ridge Parkway at Harvey's Knob but they don't get the numbers Mendota does, Hunter said. Last year he said he had more than 2,000 hawks pass overhead in one day. 913 birds passed Friday.

"I grew up hunting and stopped at 21," he said. "This, to me, is like hunting. I'm out in nature. Finding the birds is the game."

"We got a group here, Tom," Biller says. "To the right of the oak tree." "Gosh, they're hard to keep up with," Hunter says. The group gets quiet as they each count the dots gliding through the sky.

MENDOTA HAWK WATCH HISTORY

Written by Wallace Coffey, September 30, 2004

(Amended, 2005, 2007, 2008)

Birders and other curious nature observers have gathered atop Clinch Mountain above Mendota to watch the annual spectacle of massive fall hawk migration for more than 50 years.

In the late 1940's, bird watchers from East Tennessee, led by Fred W. Behrend of Elizabethton had begun to search diligently in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, East Tennessee and Western North Carolina in hopes of discovering passage flights of migrating hawks.

For more than a decade, famous lookouts in Pennsylvania had been observing and reporting flights but nothing was known about their flight paths thru the southern Appalachian Mountains.

The discovery of Clinch Mountain as a hawk migration flyway occurred September 23, 1950. Stephen M. Russell, a Bristol Bird Club member and high school student from Abingdon, Va., discovered a sensational flight of 627 Broad-winged Hawks at Hayter Knob Fire Tower in Washington County, VA.

Fred W. Behrend was the first observer to reach Mendota Fire Tower to count hawks when he saw 65 Broad-winged Hawks there on September 20, 1952.

Thomas Finucane arrived at Mendota Fire Tower lookout on September 15, 1957 to observe the migration. The following year he began regular coverage at Mendota and continued to do so for more than a quarter century

Regular coverage at Mendota has continued since 1958. Among those with long tenure coordinating and compiling annual records have been Thomas W. Finucane of Kingsport, TN, Holmes Roylston of Britol, VA, Eugene E. Scott of Nickelsville, VA, and Violet and George Larkin of Kingsport. Ron Harrington, Bristol, VA has coordinated the count for the last eight years.

In the fall of 2002, the Bristol Bird Club assumed responsibility for promoting and coordinating coverage and record keeping for the Mendota Hawk Watch.

Bob Quillen, a member of the Bristol Bird Club, had the longest tenure at the Mendota Hawk Count. He participated regularly for 44 years.

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