When Hawks Pass Through

By Bill Chaisson
OF A FEATHER
The annual reports of the town where I live are available as PDFs online from the University of New Hampshire. The oldest one is from 1870. From 1878 to the present, they are all there and I have read them all because they are the most granular history of a small town that it is possible to find.

Almost everything in those early documents (which were called “Financial Reports”) is about how much the town paid out and how much they got paid. One of the town’s expenditures for many years was to pay bounties. Not for people, thank you very much, but for animals. Mostly mammals, but some birds too.

Our historical society has, over many years, interviewed and recorded dozens of the elderly residents of the town. Their recollections begin in the 1920s. The interviewers are mostly interested in family history, but occasionally they ask questions about the state of the natural world in the town a century ago. “Did you see many bears?” The answer is invariably no. In fact, they remember very little wildlife present at all. The record of the annual report suggests that their parents’ and grandparents’ generation shot or trapped thousands of animals, and vintage photographs reveal that there was very little in the way of habitat available.

The annual reports from the 1870s and 1880s include payments for bounties on hawks, crows, foxes, and one “wild cat” (bobcat). Starting in the 1890s though the bounties were mostly for “hedgehogs,” the regional vernacular name for porcupines. This was a state program. Bounty hunters were paid by individual selectmen who were then reimbursed from the state treasury.

The National Park Service (nps.gov) has a nice online summary of the 19th century conservation movement. They note that bird conservation began in earnest in the 1870s with the founding of sportsmen’s organizations. George Bird Grinnell, who worked for the magazine Forest and Stream, wrote an editorial in 1886 that invited readers to pledge not to harm any birds. Within the first year he got over 39,000 signatures. A club called the Audubon Society formed but disbanded quickly, as the tiny staff could not handle the volume of interest.

In 1896 Harriet Lawrence Hemenway and Minna Hall, two Boston Brahmins, founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Its initial focus was on ending the use of heron and egret feathers in the fashion industry. Twenty years earlier, another Boston Brahmin, Charles Sprague Sargent was employed by the federal government to survey the nation’s forests. His report appeared as part of the U.S. Census of 1880. The gist of the report was that the forests of the United States were very fragmented and not very good habitat.

The NPS summary of early 20th century conservation reads, in part: “In 1900, the Lacey Act became the first federal legislation outlawing interstate shipment of birds killed in violation of state laws. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt established the first Federal wildlife refuge for the protection of waterfowl, Pelican Island in Florida. By the end of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency [1909], over 50 additional refuges had been established. In 1913, the signing of the Migratory Bird Treaty gave the Federal government primary jurisdiction over migratory birds, superseding state laws. With this law, the Federal Government became the primary protector of waterfowl.”

Although the Migratory Bird Treaty protected waterfowl, it also protected migrating raptors (and songbirds) as well. I remember the first time I went to Derby Hill near Oswego, N.Y. to watch the spring hawk migration. I had always seen raptors one at a time; suddenly there were hundreds or even thousands in the air above me. The more famous Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania is a place to see the fall migration. Formerly a popular place to shoot raptors, it became a sanctuary in 1934. This year the observers there began counting on August 15. Our regional hotspot is Pack Monadnock in Peterborough, 11 miles east of Mount Monadnock in Jaffrey. The Harris Center for Conservation Education runs the raptor observatory there. The daily observations are posted at hawkcount.org. Theirs began on August 20.

More raptors are seen at Hawk Mountain than Pack Monadnock; it is evidently closer to the center of the Eastern Flyway, one of the four major migratory corridors discovered in the 1920s. There is a smaller “watershed” feeding the stream of birds flying south over New Hampshire—the Maritime provinces and Labrador. In contrast, most of Quebec and Ontario serve as the source of migrants through New York and Pennsylvania.

The flyways are statistical phenomena more than discrete pipelines. Waterfowl follow watercourses, where they feel comfortable setting down to rest. Raptors follow ridges of mountains, where they can take advantage of updrafts. Really fascinating observations are made when birds are pushed off their preferred course by bad weather. Migrants from the Far West sometimes get blown from one flyway into another by a storm sweeping eastward across the country. Bad weather blowing up from the south can stall the progress of fall migrants and cause them to abruptly drop to the Earth to forage rather than fight the headwinds.

The approaching Hurricane Lee presents such an opportunity. When the cyclone is, of course, a disaster that we are simply waiting for, it is also likely to disrupt the fall migration in … interesting ways. Migrating sea- and shorebirds, for example, may get blown inland. And many passerines may pause in their southward journey for a prolonged period should the atmosphere become too turbulent and the rain too heavy.

I am leading a bird walk this Saturday and for the past two weeks it has been uncommonly quiet and rather birdless with no flights of migrants alighting near me. If the weather pushes through on Friday, Saturday might be interesting. And I won’t have to worry about anyone shooting the hawks and other birds out of the air while I watch them.

— Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. He lives and works in Wilmot.