No Ordinary Bird
AFTER CATCHING the birding bug, I discovered that many local birders where I live in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley have been maintaining a formal hawk watch for decades. The Blue Ridge Mountains serve as a well-traveled north-to-south migration route in the fall for raptors of all varieties. The hawks, eagles, and falcons that migrate through this highway gain altitude by circling and rising, buoyed by hot-air thermals along the mountain ridges before coasting southward.
Broad-winged hawks sometimes fly through in staggering numbers. The broad-wings may appear as huge, rising, circling masses of birds called or as long, seemingly endless streams of black silhouettes chained together. At the mid-September
