Hawkwatch - Chelan Ridge

BirdNote^®

HawkWatch - Chelan Ridge, Washington

Adapted from a script written by Frances Wood

This is BirdNote!
[Call of the Red-tailed Hawk heard over wind]
Imagine standing at 5000 feet on a pinnacle of rock in the Cascade Mountains. Overhead, a Red-tailed Hawk catches an updraft as it migrates south. You are at the Chelan Ridge Raptor Migration site, the best location in Washington to see migrating raptors. The U.S. Forest Service and HawkWatch International are partners in a large network of North American raptor migration sites. Each day in September and October, biologists and volunteers count and identify hawks, eagles, falcons, and vultures that soar nearby.
[Repeat Red-tail vocalizations and wind]
The workers also capture some of these birds of prey and attach aluminum leg-bands — and sometimes even satellite-telemetry devices — to gain information about migration routes and wintering areas.
Chelan Ridge welcomes visitors to their field station to count hawks with the biologists and learn more about trapping and banding. 
Last year some 2000 hawks were counted here. Compare this with 12,000 at the Goshute Mountains in Nevada, close to 8,000 at Manzano Mountains in New Mexico, and some 450,000 at Corpus Christi in Texas. Truly, a river of raptors is southbound, all coming together at the “confluence” in Veracruz, Mexico, where more than four million migrant birds of prey are counted each year.
[Repeat Red-tail vocalizations and wind]
For more, come to our website, BirdNote.org. I’m Mary McCann.
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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
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2009 Tune In to Nature.org      Completely revised for Oct. 2009

ID# old: 092105hawk1KPLU       new: hawkwatch-03-2009-10-15-MM