For the second time this week, a Mississippi Kite was seen in North Truro on Tuesday. It’s well known that Pilgrim Heights in the Cape Cod National Seashore is the best place in the state to see this rare and hopelessly graceful southern hawk. We know this thanks to the work of a rare breed of birder.
You might think you know birders: vest-wearing, obsessive, bespectacled men of a certain age. Or the archetypal “little old lady in tennis shoes”. But there’s a subculture of the birding world you may not be aware of: hawk guys.
Hawk guys aren’t into warblers, or sparrows, or, god forbid, doves. They are into hawks. Counting hawks, identifying hawks, photographing hawks, trapping hawks. If it’s predatory, tough, fast, and has talons, hawk guys are into it. Birds that are not hawks they refer to as “hawk food”. They might seem grizzled and poorly socialized from long hours of solitude counting migrating hawks up on some lonely ridge. I know of what I speak – years ago, I spent two seasons as a fall hawk counter in Westchester County New York. Every morning I climbed a thickly wooded trail up to a ridge-top counting site and did nothing but count migrating hawks for 8-10 hours. Days sometimes passed between visitors. Let’s just say you spend a lot of time inside your own head as a hawk counter. But I still loved that job.
Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay has our very own hawk guy in the form of long-time volunteer and native Cape Codder Don Manchester. Don has been at the helm of our spring hawk count since 1999, where he has helped document these spring Mississippi Kites and other migrant raptors. Between March and late June, when the wind is right, Don drives from Sandwich to Pilgrim Heights in North Truro. I looked at the numbers recently, and Don has spent more than 5000 hours spanning 1100 days at the watch site, where he’s counted over 32,000 migrating raptors of 20 species, including vultures, hawks, eagles, and falcons. We have literally hundreds of volunteers at Wellfleet Bay, but Don is a true outlier, in that there’s no one else who can or would do what he does for us.
I should make it clear that Don is a lot more than a hawk guy. He is a skilled all around birder, and keeps good track of other species, like the cuckoos, bitterns, warblers, swifts, and swallows that migrate by or breed at the site, and oddities like the Sandhill Crane that passed by last spring. He also notes the whales and seabirds visible out over the ocean from his high perch above the dunes. Don even knows his butterflies, and records them when the hawks are slow. But at his core, he is first and foremost a hawk guy. So much so that he makes a pilgrimage each fall to Cape May New Jersey, dubbed the Raptor Capital of North America, to coincide with peak falcon migration in hopes of seeing over 200 Peregrine Falcons in one day.
On days with southwest winds, Don will be at Pilgrim Heights through the end of the month, so go on up and say hello. I promise you’ll get a friendly hawk guy grunt in reply. You might get more than that if you want to talk about photography, fishing, or horses. But if you want to be safe, and maybe end up with an instant friend, I’d recommend talking about hawks.
