Broad-winged Hawk, Buteo platypterus
Broad-winged Hawks are small buteos that prey on frogs, toads, snakes, insects, small mammals, and small birds. They are distributed throughout eastern North America, as far west as British Columbia and Texas. Every year, they migrate south. They will travel as far as Brazil as they funnel through Mexico and Central America chasing their food sources.
Broad-winged Hawks are compact buteos. Their primary feathers taper so that their wings look like flickering candle flames. A large white band across a dark tail is also helpful for identification.
The most amazing way to identify these hawks, however, is to watch them in migration as they kettle and stream overhead in enormous groups. Before hawk watching, at most I had seen five Broad-wingeds soaring together. This week, I got to witness a spectacle that was truly one of the most awing things I have seen in birding. On Monday, wind and temperature conditions were optimal for big movements of these birds. I waited all day with a group of eager hawk watchers looking for Broad-wingeds to soar over, but throughout the day only trickles passed by. Then, all of a sudden, at around 3PM, the kettles got bigger. Groups of 20, 30, 40 Broad-wingeds started to fill the sky. All around there were kettles and streams of Broad-winged Hawks, and I could barely keep track of them. Over the next hour and a half, 1,200 Broad-winged hawks passed overhead. The biggest kettle had 85 birds.
A small section of a sky filled with Broad-winged Hawks. I would need a wide-angle lens to accurately capture the size of their kettle.
Tuesday was another great day, with over 500 Broad-wingeds. On Wednesday and Thursday, the winds shifted, and almost no raptors of any kind were seen at all. Then, on Friday, the winds changed back to optimal Northernly gusts. All day long we waited and waited, but the wind seemed to be too gusty and only a few individual birds passed by. Then, at 2:50 PM, it started. An enormous kettle was spotted to the east, with easily a hundred birds. As they rose up and kettled, streams from below kept feeding into the cloud of raptors until there were at least six-hundred birds forming a sort of double helix as they rose. My thumb was getting so sore from clicking my counter I could barely move it. Switching hands, I looked to the south to see another enormous group of Broad-wingeds gathering. There were hundreds of birds rising, soaring, streaming, kettling, and in the span of about ten minutes I depressed my counter clicker 1,497 times. By the time the day was ending, a final kettle of Broad-wingeds settling down for the day pushed the total of Broad-winged Hawks to 2,698 birds. There were so many birds, you could look anywhere in the sky and see them. Seeing so many individual birds pouring across the sky was one of those things that made me feel truly privileged to be alive to see such magic.
Quaker Ridge Hawk Watch has averaged over 9,000 Broad-winged Hawks in a season. This week alone, we counted over 4,500. I now understand why hawk watching is so addicting- I want to break that record! Whether we do or not, I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to witness such a spectacle of nature. Keep up with our sightings at hawkcount.org- it’s amazing to watch as hawks move across the country!
