The Western Hemisphere’s Woodland Raptor Returns North

From Central America to New Hampshire

It’s late March. Granite boulders and silver cascades surround me. It’s dark in this valley as a light fog seeps into the blue sky above. It could be a familiar scene from the Monadnock Region, but the forest tells me otherwise. I see a wall of lush green foliage in every direction, and there is certainly no snow anywhere in sight.

A banded Broad-winged Hawk in Dublin, NH. (photo © Chuck Carlson)

The forest above me is incredibly tall and diverse. The tallest trees have large branches, and twisted trunks harbor earthy green mosses, appearing shaggy like an old man’s beard. (In fact, that’s what these lichens are called.) Upon closer inspection of my scene, I notice bamboo, epiphytes (air plants), vines with flowers in shades of yellow, purple, and pink, and bright red bromeliads that resemble the highly sought-after bird, the Resplendent Quetzal, which this exotic valley is famous for. But that’s not the bird that captures my attention right now. Rather, it’s the Broad-winged Hawk.

Even here, in the land of the quetzal, deep in the cloud forests of Central America, the familiar Broad-winged Hawk of our summer forests soars. A familiar sight back home in New England during the warmer months, the Broad-winged Hawk needs forests across the entirety of its breeding, migratory, and wintering range to thrive and survive. My current location is merely the halfway point on its long migratory journey.

Broad-wings fill the Eastern hardwood and mixed forests of New England from April through September each year during the breeding season, but in the words of Hawk Mountain conservation biologist, Dr. Rebecca McCabe, “They’re everyone’s bird.” She would know.

Studying Broad-winged Hawks

Dr. McCabe has been studying and sampling Broad-wings throughout their breeding range for over a decade and leads Hawk Mountain’s Broad-winged Hawk Project. Over the past decade, McCabe and her colleagues have tagged dozens of birds with satellite and cellular transmitters to monitor and better understand the full life cycle of this mid-sized hawk. According to McCabe, “These results have revealed strong site fidelity of adults to nesting and wintering areas and provided insight on their habitat needs and range size.”

But up until now, the project has tagged mainly females because their larger body size could better and more safely accommodate the transmitters. Technology has now caught up, finally enabling the team to outfit males with these devices. Better understanding and conserving males will be critical to the success of protecting Broad-winged Hawks as a species.

Broad-winged Hawk chick in nest, Hancock, NH. (photo © Tom Momeyer)

The Harris Center will partner with Hawk Mountain for a fifth consecutive season, starting in late April when Broad-wings begin to filter back into their breeding grounds in the Monadnock Region. This partnership has proven to be a boon to the Hawk Mountain project, as it turns out the Harris Center’s “Super Sanctuary” of conserved forestlands is within the prime breeding range of Broad-wings. It’s not a reach to say this is a measure of how intact their suitable woodland habitats around us are.

Broad-wings have suffered steep declines in their breeding range in more developed states to the south and west, where forests have been converted to suburbs and other uses incompatible with successful breeding. Soon, Harris Center staff and volunteers will be searching for Broad-wings and monitoring nesting success. If this effort is successful, we may all be able to follow the movements of some of this project’s first adult males.

Back to my scene in the Costa Rican cloud forest at 8,000 feet in elevation, Broad-wings, which spend the non-breeding season (our winter) in South America, soar into the clouds. Their travel companions include the usual vultures we see in the Northeast, as well as graceful, sleek Swallow-tailed Kites, black and white against the dark green forest, always a striking sight. (Not to mention their oversized tail feathers, which splay into a huge pair of scissors in flight.)

A map showing the migration route of a Broad-winged Hawk who nested in Dublin, NH and overwintered in South America. (image © Rebecca McCabe, Hawk Mountain)

Long-distance Champion

Among the raptors above me may be the likes of ‘Skatutakee’, the female Broad-wing I’ve been monitoring at her Dublin nest for the past three breeding seasons. She holds the record as the individual transmitting for the longest duration of time, and she’s also the long-distance champion of the project, again having spent another winter near La Paz, Bolivia, over 4,000 straight-line miles from her nest site in Dublin. With any luck (and she’s had some, surviving two nearby tornadoes, a predation attempt on her nestlings, and countless other untold stories from her thousands of miles across a dozen countries), Skatutakee will return to her territory, find her mate, and raise young again. I can’t help but wonder if she’s above me now.

Thanks to transmitter technology and direct observation, we’re starting to know a bit about a small sample of nesting Broad-winged Hawks. But how they interact with these disparate forests is still a big mystery. They forage and rest here and may spend several days to weeks in such environments, in transit between their two main homes.

Do they find food with the same ease as they seem to in our forests? How long do they stay? What threats face them here? I watch them pass over, but I observe them only briefly until the vast, dense forest swallows them up. Despite what we already know, there’s still so much to learn about these incredible raptors.