Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 19:57:25 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Paul O'Brien Subject: Major Broadwinged Hawk Flight Over Rockville MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit The pity is that I didn't begin looking earlier. After finishing up some yard work at 12:15PM, and knowing that today should be about the peak for Broadwings, I followed Bob Augustine's advice, focused on the nice fluffy white clouds and immediately found a large squadron of Broadwinged Hawks. Unfortunately, before I could begin to count them, they disappeared behind the trees in my back yard. I guessed that there were perhaps 100. Others were streaming across the sky behind them and I began counting. With timeouts amounting to about 1/2 hour, I continued the count until 4:45PM, reaching a total of 927. Add that to the estimated first 100 or so and it is clear that at least 1000 Broadwinged Hawks flew over my house today. With the late start and the timeouts I could have missed hundreds more, possibly even thousands. I'll never know. In addition to the Broadwings, I saw 10 Sharp-shinned Hawks, 1 Red-shouldered Hawk,1 American Kestrel and 3 Black Vultures. All were moving southwest and high. There were 13 Monarchs as well. Paul O'Brien Rockville, Mont. Co., MD pobrien776@aol.com ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================