Veracruz, River of Raptors

BirdNote^®

Veracruz – River of Raptors

Written by Frances Wood

This is BirdNote!
[Call of the Red-tailed Hawk]
 Autumn hawk-watching sites draw thousands of visitors each year, from New Jersey’s Cape May, to San Francisco’s Hawk Hill near the Golden Gate Bridge. Today we travel south to Veracruz, Mexico, where the flow of migrating raptors contains birds from all over eastern North America. Each fall in Veracruz, volunteers count five and a half million migrating eagles, vultures, and hawks.
[Mexican music composed by Nancy Rumbel]
The town of Cardel lies on the flat coastal lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico. The tallest point in town is the roof of the five-story Bienvenido Hotel. It is here that the raptor-watchers spend the day using hand-held devices to count the birds. And when the birds are teeming overhead, the mechanical counters tick constantly.
Now imagine a night removed from the harsh glare of the city. You marvel at the immensity and brilliance of the Milky Way above. The uncountable stars stretch from horizon to horizon. Now turn that night into cobalt blue, the stars into black dots, and you begin to visualize the Veracruz migration, the largest raptor migration anywhere in the world.
[Red-tailed Hawk over the Mexican music]
To find out more, come to our web site, BirdNote.org.
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Call of the Red-tailed Hawk provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by L.J. Peyton
Music composed and played by Nancy Rumbel
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
 2011 Tune In to Nature.org   October 2011   Narrator: Frank Corrado

ID#092205hawkIIKPLU    hawkwatch-02b