From atop Pack Monadnock mountain, in clear fall weather, you can see the Boston skyline 55 miles away to the southeast. Turn the other direction and the valleys are riots of color, stretching across to the singular peak of Monadnock (which Pack Monadnock is named after – Pack is “Little” in Abenaki).
It’s here you can catch one of the most extraordinary migratory formations in nature: a kettle of raptors. Thousands of great birds of prey, dark wings outstretched, spiral through the warm air along the ridgelines. From atop the circling, whirling crowd, like steam boiling off, a thin stream of birds slips southward toward their winter home. Hawk watchers – naturalists and volunteers from the Audubon Society and New Hampshire’s Harris Center for Conservation Education – count them through binoculars, clicking furiously as the numbers mount.
Or at least, that’s how it’s been described to me. I arrived atop Pack Monadnock too late this month. The broad-wing hawks, who make up the biggest part of the annual migration, had already passed through.
This has happened to me every year, except for the years when I came too early.
I’ve never regretted a single time.
Begin with the mountain. Despite its “Little” designation, Pack Monadnock is a satisfying, short, beautiful climb, steep enough to be taxing in sections, with varied woodland and springs and gorgeous rock formations. There’s also a road to the top. I’ve never driven, but I’ve walked down it after catching sunset from the peak. The ambitious can extend their hike 21.5 miles along the Wapack Trail all the way to Mount Watatic in Massachusetts.
Now consider the effort to track the migrating raptors, and its history, which I learn in conversation with Harris Center wildlife biologist Caroline Fegley, who’s heading up this year’s Pack Monadnock raptor count. Cheeks ruddy with the brisk wind, bundled up for a long day of standing on an exposed rock, her glee at her role is contagious. She describes how each fall, raptors from across the Northeast and Canada make their way south along the Appalachians, forming a concentrated flyway beside Pennsylvania’s 200-mile Kittatinny Ridge.
Until the 1930s, this gathering of raptors was seen as a prime opportunity to get rid of birds regarded as nuisance predators on livestock. Farmers and hunters armed with shotguns and rifles positioned themselves each year atop a mountain along the route. The slaughter was dramatic – enough so that in 1932, when Philadelphia-based amateur ornithologist Richard Pough photographed the gathered dead bodies, it sparked the outrage of a New York philanthropist and conservationist named Rosalie Edge.
Edge, who’s overdue for a biopic, was a force of (literal) nature, a woman unafraid of trouble and unwilling to stand down; she was instrumental in the fight for women’s suffrage in New York, went toe to toe with the Audubon Society and the National Park Service to shame and shut down their predator elimination policies, and spearheaded the creation of Olympic National Park. Her response to Bough’s photographs was to lease and then raise the funds to buy the entire mountain where the hunters gathered to shoot, bar them from access and to install naturalists instead. The area, renamed “Hawk Mountain,” became the world’s first refuge for birds of prey. The meticulous records the naturalists started keeping in 1934 informed the research Rachel Carson drew on for 1962’s “Silent Spring,” which publicized DDT’s ravages and sparked the modern environmental movement.
We are adding to an expanded version of that body of research now. Raptor counting stations have been established in hundreds of locations, with daily totals tallied by the Hawk Migration Association of North America. Even the absence of birds, which is what we are documenting atop Pack Monadnock the Saturday that I’m there, is significant. Fegley reassures me nothing terrible is necessarily going on, even though Monadnock is shaping up to be at a 20-year low for raptor numbers. Rain and wind and storm can move the whole column of migrating birds west or east, and some sites not far from here are seeing unusually high numbers. This is why it’s good to count in lots of places, and over many years – to spot the real trends.
Expertise such as Fegley’s is also helpful. A volunteer catches sight of a pair of raptors circling a distance ridge. After a moment of study through the binoculars, Fegley declines to count them. “They’re locals. Playing, taking their time, wasting energy,” she said. “Migrating birds aren’t going to be doing that. They can’t spare the energy; they’re on a mission to cover a lot of distance.”
Not that the mission can’t permit some diversion. A fast-moving bird cuts suddenly upward from the ridge beneath us, darts past, dive bombs a plastic owl on a post, banks acrobatically and is gone. All of us are astonished at its speed. “That wasn’t a raptor, was it?” I ask. “It was tiny.”
“A sharp-shinned hawk. Sharpie, for short. The smallest raptor in New England,” Fegley says. “Blue-gray wings, copper barring at the chest.” She writes it down as a migrating bird.
“How do you know it’s not local?”
She points to the plastic owl. “Gina there. Birds from this area know she’s a decoy. The ones passing through think she’s real and take a shot at her. That’s why we put her there, so we can spot the behavior.”
I learn something new every year. Maybe next time, I’ll even figure out how to time the broad-wing hawks as they wheel in their vast kettles in the sky.
Keep track of the migration, and find volunteer and learning opportunities, at the Harris Center for Conservation Education.
Greg Harris is the founding editor of the literary magazine Pangyrus and the founder and co-director of Harvard LITfest. His essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Review, Jewish Fiction, Earth Island Journal and elsewhere.
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