PUTNEY — In their end-of-season report, Putney Mountain Hawkwatch saw an “uninspiringly” low raptor count for their 2025 season, despite 2024 being ‘the best year ever’ recorded.
Putney Mountain Hawkwatch has been a raptor counting site since 1974. Every day, from August to November, someone sits on the summit of Putney Mountain, counting all the species that fly by.
From broad-winged hawks, red-tail hawks, Blue Jays and Canadian geese, each bird is recorded on a database used by the Hawk Migration Association.
This year, Putney Mountain saw 8,324 raptors. 6,036 were broad-winged hawks, a common North American species. Last year, they reported a total of 19,428 raptors with about 16,000 broad-wings.
John Anderson, a hawkwatch volunteer since 1996, said the counters use the huge proportion of broad-winged hawks to gauge what overall numbers they’re going to end up with throughout the season.
“The broad-wings were all gone by the end of September," he said, which showed signs of a low-count year.
Anderson said he has kept track of other hawkwatches and found nobody had a really good year.
“The total for the Northeast has probably been the lowest it’s been for decades,” he said.
Julie Brown is the raptor migration and programs director for the Hawkwatch Migration Association and on the board of the Northeast Hawk Watch, a chapter of the HMA. She explained that during broad-winged migration, which primarily happens during September, a strong cold front with winds from the North and Northwest will get the birds into migration mode.
But warmer temperatures during September have changed the birds’ migration patterns, she said.
Anderson said the same — different weather patterns and jet streams send the birds on different paths south than what they took 50 years ago.
“So the hawkwatches have stayed stationary but the paths of the birds have changed,” he said.
Brown said the broad-wings have a narrow migration window in the Northeast.
“For a lot of species, like red-tailed hawks or Northern Carriers, they may just wait until the right conditions. But broad-wings are pretty tightly tied to that narrow window of migration,” she said.
This species, Brown said, relies on small birds and amphibians to feed on during that seasonal window so they are stubborn about when they migrate.
Luckily for the broad-winged hawk, Brown raised no concern for the overall population.
“It’s easy for people to think, ‘Well, their population must be really low or maybe they had a bad breeding year,’” she said. “In most cases, it’s just that these birds are going elsewhere. They’re not taking their traditional flight lines.”
Brown advised those concerned to focus on migration data along the Gulf of Mexico and Central America, where all sites show the species as stable.
“They don’t appear to be declining based on what we see on migration at those southern sites,” she said.
Brown said it’s important to get data no matter how much is recorded.
“If we had hawkwatches blanketing the Northeast, someone would see those numbers,” she said.
Brown called the broad-wings “the superstars of fall migrations,” since they are one of the few species that migrate in large numbers.
“Everybody wants to see them, everybody comes out for them,” she said. “It’s just a bummer for people who are excited to see them and may not get a chance. But yeah, their population seems to be doing just fine.”
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