Holiday Beach Hawk Watch Amherstburg, Ontario, Canada Daily Raptor Counts: Sep 20, 2024 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Species Day's Count Month Total Season Total ------------------ ----------- -------------- -------------- Turkey Vulture 0 273 295 Osprey 0 18 18 Bald Eagle 0 93 96 Northern Harrier 10 202 221 Sharp-shinned Hawk 434 2462 2464 Cooper's Hawk 1 57 58 American Goshawk 0 0 0 Red-shouldered Hawk 0 0 0 Broad-winged Hawk 15 2194 2206 Red-tailed Hawk 0 267 307 Rough-legged Hawk 0 0 0 Golden Eagle 0 0 0 American Kestrel 54 495 503 Merlin 0 44 44 Peregrine Falcon 0 18 18 Unknown Accipiter 0 0 0 Unknown Buteo 0 0 0 Unknown Eagle 0 0 0 Unknown Falcon 0 0 0 Unknown Raptor 0 0 0 Mississippi Kite 0 1 1 Total: 514 6124 6231 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Observation start time: 07:00:00 Observation end time: 15:00:00 Total observation time: 8 hours Official Counter: Kiah Jasper Observers: Hugh Kent, Mike Jaber, Patrick Tomlinson, Steve Wagner Visitors: Thanks to Mike, Hugh, Patrick and Steve for helping out with the count today (shoutout to Mike for helping me click Jays). Steve and Patrick left and headed back to the USA today, their help was appreciated over the past week. Stan and Roger visited from LaSalle, and Mitchell and Terry from Niagara came by again today. Clare and Brian also popped by for a bit in the afternoon. Weather: Today the wind stayed out of the East/Southeast for the duration of the watch... Not our ideal wind! The temperature rose from 18 degrees C to a max of 26 degrees. It was cloudy from the majority of the day, with an average of over 60% cloud cover. In the late afternoon a storm began approaching from the west, but light rain didn't begin until well after we left. The barometer was lower today than it has been for the majority of the last week, sitting at 29.74. Raptor Observations: Today was another "Sharpie Day", with 434 recorded. This makes sense though because the sharpies are less wind dependent than some of the other, larger raptors and they tend to migrate along the coast even with Southeast winds. American Kestrels were also out in decent numbers, with 54 recorded. Besides those two species it was quite bleak on the raptor front, save for a few Northern Harriers and 15 lonely Broad-winged Hawks. Non-raptor Observations: It was much slower on the non raptor front than yesterday, both for species diversity and number of birds seen. 32 warblers of 11 species were recorded from the tower, with Bay-breasted, Cape May and Yellow-rumped being the most common. Our first Yellow-bellied Sapsucker of the season flew by, as well as our first Wilson's Snipe. 12,900 Blue Jays were seen migrating overhead, their numbers continuing to build each day here. 74 species were recorded from the tower today, for the full list see this eBird link - https://ebird.org/checklist/S195844758 Predictions: The current weather models are predicting the wind will be out of the Northwest during the morning, but may shift to the South around noon. Hopefully even a bit of North wind will encourage a few raptors to move though. It will be another hot & sunny day, with temperatures in the high 20s. ======================================================================== Report submitted by Kiah Jasper (kiahbirder@gmail.com) Holiday Beach Hawk Watch information may be found at: http://hbmo.ca/ More site information at hawkcount.org: https://hawkcount.org/siteinfo.php?rsite=100