From 9:30 to 11:00 am on September 18, 2015, I was in the Welsh Mountains, a peninsula of wooded hills jutting into the farmland of eastern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. I was there to watch for the migration of broad-winged hawks that I know are now coming through this area, as they do every year at this time.
On the way to the Welsh Mountains, I noticed fall "was in the air" and the landscape looked to be autumn. Yellow blooms on patches of Canada goldenrod along rural roadsides and in fields, clumps of bur-marigolds along pasture brooks, and ten-foot-tall Jerusalem artichokes, a kind of wild sunflower along country roads, brightened the countryside.
I had been watching the rut of elk in north-central Pennsylvania through the Pennsylvania Game Commission's live camera on our computer screen the last several days, Several cow elk and their calves and, usually, one bull elk gather in a field, surrounded by woods in the mountains, to graze on grass and mate. The bull frequently bugles his presence and is sometimes answered by one or two rival bull elk. Those large deer and the bugling are quite impressive and I realized the elk rut and broad-wing migration out of northeastern North America peak about the same time, around the autumn equinox. And both fall phenomena are spectacular natural happenings to us human observers.
I stationed myself in a small public park, completely surrounded by deciduous trees, in the wooded hills and got my binoculars ready. The day was sunny and warm, with little wind, a lovely, typical autumn day in this area. I noticed there were some red leaves on black gum and red maple trees, and several yellow ones on tulip poplar trees.
Soon several turkey vultures soared and circled overhead, as they rose on rising thermals of sun-warmed air. I thought, "get ready, the broadies won't belong now". Those vultures are often heralds of broad-wings rising from the woods where they perched in trees the night before. And, sure enough, broadies soon started rising from the surrounding woods.
Seemingly with no time to waste, those broad-winged hawks quickly began gathering in a thermal that pushed them higher and higher in the sky. As that "kettle" of silent broad-wings kept swirling and "boiling" higher and still higher, more and more broadies entered it and spiraled upward, too. Within a minute, they were at the zenith of their effortless climb into the sky on out-stretched wings, and rapidly peeled off to the southwest. Within seconds, they were out of sight.
But soon another kettle of broad-wings formed over the park where I was and peeled off to the southwest. Now that those broad-winged hawks are airborne, warm air pushes them up, but gravity pulls them down. That results in a gradual descent. So during each day of migrating, flocks of broadies are obliged to look for thermals of rising, warmed air to keep them aloft and moving southwest to Mexico, Central America and, finally, into northern South America where they spend the northern winter.
Meanwhile, back in the park in the wooded Welsh Mountains, I watched for more broad-wing kettles, but didn't see any more. Those hawks that spent the night in surrounding woods quickly moved on and rapidly became too high to see. But, in the meantime, I saw a few migrant warblers catching insects in the surrounding trees. A ruby-throated hummingbird shot by me on its way to northern South America. A few migrating monarch butterflies fluttered low across the baseball field of the park while a couple of small flocks of tree swallows with their gleaming, white bellies flew above the tree line in southerly direction. All those creatures helped make the sighting of south-bound broad-winged hawks even more entertaining and exciting. It was a beautiful, exciting and good hour and a half I spent in the wooded Welsh Mountains.
Readers can get out when natural phenomena are occurring. Nature is exciting, entertaining and inspiring.
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