I kept looking out the bus window towards the sky. The sun was just rising
over the Gulf of Mexico as we were heading down the mountains from the cloud
forest city of Xalapa towards the coastal plain below. We would soon be
watching one of the world's great animal migrations: the “Veracruz River of Raptors.”
Every fall millions of raptors - hawks, falcons, and vultures - leave their
breeding grounds in the United States and Canada and head for southern Mexico,
Central America, and as far as Argentina in South America to wait out the
northern winter before returning in the spring. These migrants fly together
through a narrow pass beneath the Mexican Altiplano and Veracruz's gulf coast
in a span of just a few weeks. During this time, between ten thousand and
five-hundred thousand raptors are counted each day at monitoring stations in
the small towns of Chichicaxtle and Cardel. It is the largest congregation of
migrating raptors in the world.
As the road leveled out I knew we were getting closer to Cardel, the first
stop of the day's journey. Still, I didn't see the clouds of hawks that I had
expected. Instead, rain clouds were rolling in from the gulf, a bad sign for
hawks that soar on hot air currents and updrafts created by the tropical sun. With
the recent escalation of violence in Veracruz, it wouldn't be long before the entire
state of Veracruz would be deemed off-limits by Peace Corps; this was a
once-in-a-lifetime trip, and my last chance to see the migration. Was
this going to be one of the rare days that only a handful of raptors pass by?
The first monitoring station was under a tent on top of a hotel in Cardel.
We were greeted by several volunteers who were responsible for counting the
birds. They had seen one Osprey fly over and there was a Peregrine Falcon
perched on a nearby cell tower, but not the river of raptors we were waiting for.
A few other tourists began trickling in; a group from the Netherlands, a few Mexican
couples, and even a few Americans that tried to talk to me in broken Spanish
before asking the volunteers to translate their English into Spanish for me so
that I could understand. I let them go on like that for a while, before
explaining to them in English that I was from Buffalo, New York. The west side.
(Although maybe my accent through them off a little. The southerners in Peace Corps think I sound more Canadian than American. I think it's aboot time they shut up aboot it.)
As we sat there, the rain clouds began to part and the temperatures began to
rise. A single Sharp-shinned Hawk flew by. Then another, followed by a Cooper's
Hawk. In the distance I saw several Black Vultures soaring. Then things went
silent for a while. Nothing appeared. The Peregrine Falcon that was perched
nearby had disappeared. Was that it? Was the day a bust? We all sat silent. One
group decided to leave early.
Suddenly someone pointed out what looked like a puff of black smoke against
the blue sky to the north, on the far horizon. Through my binoculars I saw what we had come for; it was a group of thousands of hawks, but too distant
to identify. The raptors were flying in a line towards an updraft, or a current
of quickly rising hot air. They were entering the bottom of the updraft, swirling
together slowly up several thousand feet to the top, and then
soaring out of the top in a line towards the next updraft. Throughout
this entire process they never beat their wings, saving as much energy as
possible on their epic journey. The river slowly came closer to us, passed over
head, and then disappeared far to the south.
This scene repeated itself over and over again for the next several hours.
Each group had two, three, or four-thousand raptors of different shapes and sizes.
When they circled in an updraft they flew together in a confusing, busy cloud. When they left the updraft, they raced each other in a
straight line in without stopping until they reached the next updraft. The groups were made
up mostly of Turkey Vultures who are present throughout the migration,
Broad-winged Hawks whose numbers were just peaking, and Swainson’s Hawks whose
numbers would peak in a few short days.
In between sightings we sat silently on the rooftop, waiting. As the each new group of birds appeared the silence on the rooftop was be
broken by the volunteer bird counters as they started pushing away on their
clickers, each holding three separate clickers for the three main species in
the migration, furiously clicking until the raptors disappeared again over the
opposite horizon. As the clicking stopped, silence returned as we waited for
the next large group to appear.
We spent the second half of the day in Chichicaxtle on an observation tower located
between several little league baseball and soccer fields. The kids, coaches,
and parents at the games below occasionally glanced curiously up at the strange
people with binoculars and telescopes on top of the observation tower, fixated
on the horizon, wondering what we could possibly be doing. We occasionally
glanced back, wondering how they could go on with the game oblivious to the
thousands of raptors – or one of several large flocks of Wood Storks - passing
overhead.
At the end of the day, we had seen the river of raptors that we came for, a
river that sometimes stretched from horizon to horizon, broken only by two or
three towering clouds of birds. I saw my first Broad-winged Hawk,
and my thirty-thousandth, all within a span
of five hours. In total, the volunteers counted nearly 90,000 raptors that afternoon.
Although we weren’t lucky enough to see five-hundred thousand raptors in a
single day, it weren’t half bad, eh?
http://hawkcount.org/month_summary.php?rsite=528&PHPSESSID=991def76a024fa7f62a020ab14021a4e
 |
| (Wood Storks) |
Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_i-Ls6keTI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3J0OunOyUE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znqo8I7sg3Y
