Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Fall is ending up to be a good time for birders to be on the Hawk Watch

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Tuesday, October 17, 2000

Fall is ending up to be a good time for birders to be on the Hawk Watch

Louise Cooke, dear long-time friend, the same vintage as my daughter, called about 3 p.m. on last Tuesday. "Phyl,'' she said, (she is almost the only one still allowed to call me Phyl), "I've never seen so many hawks.'' From her home out of Five Points as she was hurrying into town to pick up her boys at school. Cutting over to Interstate Highway 37, she began to notice hawks coming down. At my urging, she tried to describe them. To inexperienced hawk watchers this is an almost impossible task.
   There were low clouds, the weather was worsening and migrating hawks had been caught traveling. They had to pick a place, appropriate or not, and set down before dark and rain coincided.
   I couldn't go, but I did. I called Kathie Griffith and we set out to see if we could see some of the raptors. I guessed wrongly that some of them would be landing at Pollywog Pond, an isolated wooded area at the junction of Up River Road and Sharpsburg Road. Swallows were dive-bombing the ditches there, and black vultures were already settled in to roost on a high wire electric tower, but no hawks. We went to Hazel Bazemore county Park where the Hawk Watch personnel are usually shut down by 5 p.m. We found Scott Rush, Beth Hahn, and Joel Simon, who told us they had seen several large kettles pass over, turn west and apparently go down.
   We were losing our light, had to go in for a meeting that night, and so gave up the chase. As we drove from the park, we saw that we judged to be a young Swainson's on the road. It fled to a telephone pole but not before we had looked into its cold, wild eyes.
   The next morning, Wednesday, I resisted as long as possible before my Volkswagon van clasped me into the driver's seat, backed out the drive, and headed for parts west. Clouds were heavy, almost misting. I bypassed Hazel Bazemore, figuring the fall-out had probably taken the birds to the Westlake area. Out Farm-to-Market Road 624 I traveled a mile or so beyond the intersection with Farm-to-Market Road 555 and a few blocks into where roadwork is being done. I then noticed the car in front of me had an arm thrust from the window on the driver's side and its hand was pointing to a roadside tree.
   In the car were Nancy Devlin and Margie Di Clemente, enthusiastic birders met on a recent trip to Big Bend. They were pointing to a tree full of hawks. I pulled off the shoulderless highway behind them, groping for my camera. The real sight they wanted to show me was not in the tree but on the ground. Hundreds of hawks were spaced out in the plowed and fenced field beside the road. These birds were almost sure to be Swainson's hawks. To look into that field and see them spread across from one edge to the other, almost in rows, was a serendipitous birding experience.
   I had seen them roosting in fields another year and had tried without success to find them again. Swainson's are large buteos of the western plains. They are of a size and shape similar to red-tailed hawks, but with slightly narrower and more pointed wings. There are two color phases in adult birds, a light and a melanistic or dark. In the light phase, head and all upper parts are dark brown. A wide chestnut band across the chest contrasts with white throat and pale belly. On the underside of the wings, white inner half contrasts with dark outer half. In the dark phase, birds are more or less sooty-black all over. Tails are alike in both phases, gray with many narrow bands but with one wide, dark band near the end.
   A slow rain the next day was sure to hold the migrants down. No thermals to ride, no fast streams aloft to carry them smoothly to South America. I thought of them, waiting like resigned holiday crowds in an airport that has been socked in.
   Now it is Thursday afternoon. Today dawned clear and picture perfect, the way October days should always be. At a little past noon, Louise called again. "Phyl, you smut come. They're flying up all around. Some are going right over my house.'' Of course, I couldn't go. I had a column to write. She had to talk some more, telling what she could see, "I got out the Peterson's Field Guide,'' she told me, "and the best I could see was that some appeared to be broadwings, but on others that dark head and chest were clearly visible. Some may have been white-tailed hawks.'' You are a good observer, I told her proudly.
   Just goes to show ... the Hawk Watch isn't over 'til it's over.


Phyllis Yochem, a Corpus Christi resident, has studied birds of Texas since 1960.

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