Meet the Commissary Ridge Crew
Text and photos by Will Britton Commissary Ridge HawkWatch is entering it’s 4th week and things are starting to heat up raptor-wise. Weather-wise, things are seriously cooling down after a warm first couple weeks. In typical Commissary Ridge fashion, we have donned layer upon layer to count migrant raptors. The…
Meet the Corpus Christi Crew
Text by Matthew Mills On the verge of migration's peak, the Corpus Christi HawkWatch crew has already tallied over 31,000 raptors for the season. Highlights include a first site record for Gray Hawk (!) and the first Aplomado Falcon since 2011. In addition, two early records have been broken this year:…
Djibouti Project Update
This autumn we set out to conduct the first-ever full migration season raptor monitoring at the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait in remote northern Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa. This site is expected to be perhaps the largest migratory bottleneck along the Eurasia – East Africa flyway, with at least 32 raptor…
Smoke Looms at Bonney Butte
Text and photos by Caleb Hansen Few workplaces are as beautiful and inspiring as the austerity of the Bonney Butte HawkWatch in Mt. Hood National Forest. In the days it has been visible, Mt. Hood has been at the forefront of my imagination. The sight of an adult Golden Eagle…
Meet the 2017 Manzanos Crew
Text by Sarah Hecocks Greetings from the Manzano Mountains HawkWatch! Two weeks in and things are really starting to pick up as far as fall migration goes. As I type the words you’re reading, the cool westward winds whip and blow the canvas of our wall tent that the crew…
Meet the 2017 Goshutes Crew
Text and photos by Casey Weissburg Fall migration is well underway here at the Goshute Mountains HawkWatch, as we enter our fourth week of counting with over 1,300 raptors migrated already, and almost 150 trapped and banded, including our first Golden Eagle of the season, three Northern Goshawks, and even…
HawkWatch International Partners with the University of Utah to Study Raptors in Africa
HawkWatch International and the University of Utah are partnering on two studies in the Horn of Africa: a new effort studying raptor migration over the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait in Djibouti, and a continuation of vulture extinction studies based in Ethiopia. Evan Buechley, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah, will…
Raptor Fun Facts: Ultraviolet Sensors
Sponsored by Did you know that some species of raptor can see ultraviolet light? This is helpful because small mammals such as voles and mice mark their tracks with urine, and urine is a substance that reflects ultraviolet light. Because of this, some raptors are able to see the…
Mountain Outlaw Magazine story
Max Lowe, Forest Woodard, and Charles Post took a road trip last fall (2016) to follow the raptor migration and document HawkWatch International's migration research. Here's a great photographic story by the group features in Mountain Outlaw magazine's Summer 2017 edition. (Click the image below to view the PDF.)