Wednesday March 24th

Having being forced to sit out the last two days because of the weather, Mabel and I headed to the hawksite this morning with bated breath. The first sunny day after wet weather is generally better for hawks than at any other time, but because of the accompanying cold front we didn't expect miracles (warm fronts are best).

What turned out to be a sunny but very windy day found us half-way to St-Stanislas de Kostka . Our first bird was the first Turkey Vulture of the season, quickly followed by a parade of eagles, mixed in with Red-shouldered Hawks, Rough-legged Hawks, Red-tailed Hawks and Northern harriers. The eagle parade on the 18th was a record breaker but today's parade outshone it. After standing in the cold wind, holding onto the scope, for over 7 hours, finishing at 5.45 p.m., our tally was 20 Golden Eagles and 5 Bald Eagles. We actually saw more eagles but decided to discount a few of them to avoid possible double counting, so the tally could have been even higher. (In strong winds hawks and eagles zigzag in order to get where they are headed, sometimes leading to some limited backtracking. Also, the 10s of thousands of geese constantly flushing from the fields sometimes causes you to loose track of a bird.).

At this point we have already recorded 70 eagles, 80% of which were Goldens. Whether this will continue at this pace for the next couple of weeks is anybodies guess, but it is unlikely. We may have seen the majority of the Goldens already, but there are still lots of Bald Eagles to come.

Cheers, Bob.