Sunday, September 14, 2008

Broadwings are coming!

Northerly flow will drive winds across New Jersey beginning, according to weather underground, tomorrow afternoon and continuing through until next weekend. Such weather in mid-September surely means we will see our largest push of migrant Broadwing hawks of the fall this week. Depending on wind patterns and conditions, single hawkwatches in New Jersey could see single days of 5,000 or more birds. It is truly a spectacular sight!

Taking a look at birdhawk archives, you can see that hawkwatches to our north were reporting modest totals late last week; between 800-1000 birds. Hawk Mountain in PA already had a one day total of 1100, the vanguard flight if you will, but Broadwings have yet to build up in the Northeast in large numbers. I suspect that between Monday and Wednesday they will, as the remnants of Ike take an exit and a cold front sweeps across the region. This would set things up perfectly for NJ to see a big push Thu or Fri. There's a few weather hiccups between now and then, so keep an eye on the forecast, but this entire week should be great hawk watching.

Looking ahead, with the exception of tomorrow winds will range from N-ENE. Wind direction is important to bear in mind when deciding where to catch the big Broadwing push. Broadwing hawks are buteos, a group of raptors adapted for sustained, low energy soaring. The drawback to such morphology is a greater reliance on winds and conditions to stay aloft. The result is a strong tendency to go with the flow, so to speak. With winds primarily from the Northeast, more inland hawkwatches will be favored, particularly those along the hawk super highway that is the Appalachian ridge. Raccoon Ridge and Hawk Mountain could be excellent. Scott's mountain could also be very good. Watches further east, such as Chimney Rock at the south western terminus of the Watchung range, may see smaller numbers as broadwings have the wind at their backs along less risky, more inland routes. This of course could change as the week goes on, and a substantial shift to the NW would make Chimney Rock, or Montclair at the other end of the Watchungs, the place to be.

3 comments:

Blake Mathys said...

Hmmm...have the broad-wings arrived yet?

Blake Mathys said...

Wait, I think I see a hawk in the distance, maybe it is one of the long-anticipated Broad-winged Hawks referred to in this post...looks good so far, nice Buteo shape...wait, darn it. Redtail. They'll get here someday.

Blake Mathys said...

You know, I'm starting to think that this blog will never be updated, and the hawks will never arrive. Sad.