 project that we've been working, we've been working with the folks in New Hampshire, Phil Brown with for a couple years now. So I'm not going to talk a lot about Hawk Mountain, but I happen to answer questions later, or encourage you guys to go to our website to learn more about what's going on here and all the opportunities to visit and see what's see some raptors here along the Okay, so how do I get this to advance interesting right there. Okay, well this is the view. Most of us have a broad wing Hawks if you're a birdwatcher you step outside during the fall period or, or mid spring and you can see a flock of being be like creatures above in the sky and, and we all get excited because these are our harbingers harbingers of spring and the returning and harbingers of fall as well when they pass through in September. So in broad wing Hawks are the most numerous migrant that we see. We count up to 13,000 usually each fall season, which is more than half or, or about half of all the migrants that we see at Hawk Mountain so they're pretty important bird at Hawk Mountain, as well as at many other sites. What do we know about broad wing Hawks or what do what what do we know basic biology as birdwatchers, we can go to e bird or to all about birds at Cornell and we can learn we can see that these birds are long distance migrants they're migrating from places all throughout the eastern North America, and as far west is Western Canada, and they migrate down mostly into central and South America for the winter. They are a forest nesting bird so they are found primarily in forest as well. They are kind of a small stocky raptor about the size of a crow they have these broad white black and white tail bands that are very distinctive on the adults in this dark trailing edge, and they have a very distinctive call that you may hear when you're out in the forest around main. When you're listening to the, to the birds in the forest you may hear this high pitched here whistle, which is very distinctive attribute of the broad wing Hawk. Of course, one of the other really amazing things about broad wings is that they build their flocks build in size as they go south so when you get down to Texas, or Mexico you may see flocks that look like this which are really awesome. awe inspiring sites and one wonders you know what is going on and how these birds are behaving and and how are they moving through the continent in such large numbers. So they are what we call a long distance migrant they're also complete migrant which means they nearly all of the broad wing Hawks that nest throughout their breeding range. Leave that be breeding range for a very distinct wintering area. It's very ambiguous and migration and concentrated these are just some examples that Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, our peak flight ever in our 90 year history is 22,001 day. But if you go up along the Great Lakes, such as Hawk Ridge, Minnesota, you could have up to 100,000 birds pass in a day. And as you move south that number grows and grows and Texas, they can have up to half a million and then in their cruise river raptors. So 800,000 is is a possible one day count for broad wings. So it's fairly amazing bird in migration and very conspicuous. Their timing is very constrained in time and so when they're moving through these large numbers, a lot of them are passing through a certain area within a mostly within one weeks time period. But when you look at broad wing Hawks in the other parts of the year like the nesting season they're very inconspicuous like you can see in this bird here perching in the forest. They're other than that high pitched whistle which they use occasionally. There can be very, very difficult to spot. So why did we decide to study them. Well, first of all, as I said before they're one of the most conspicuous migrants and most numerous migrants Eastern North America. So they're also a species that has shown some regional declines. And these are data points that represent trends at at watch sites or hawk watch sites all across the United States and Canada, and some in Mexico and anywhere where the blue circle is is a site that's showing stable counts of broad wing Hawks, but the bird, the sites which have red arrows are places where we're seeing declines in the migrating counts of those birds. And that here in Eastern North America. There's a cluster of these red arrows, which cause concern if you're interested in conservation of these species. If we zoom in on those red arrows. You can see, it almost looks like they're mostly concentrated in the eastern part of the migration area so east of the Appalachian Mountains is where we're seeing the highest proportion of these declining counts. So it's because of these declining counts on migration, and also on the breeding grounds these are some data comparing breeding bird Atlas projects which have been done more than once. So the, and looking at whether there's a change in the number or the extent of the breeding range for the broad wing hawk. And you can see anywhere in red in this area from Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, or areas which are showing declines in the probability of seeing broad wing Hawks so southern Pennsylvania. Eastern Ohio or big areas where we're seeing declines in broad wing Hawks. So because of these declines in in migration and in breeding season we decided we wanted to do a full like life cycle study of the broad wing hawk. And Hawk Mountain was founded in 1934 by Rosalie Edge and her, one of her big statements that we use as a motto for a lot of our work here is that the time to save a species is while it's still common. And that just makes sense that it, if we just ignore these, these little declines and hope they'll go away, then they become bigger declines and then turning them around becomes a lot harder. So we started in 2014 the broad wing hawk project here in Pennsylvania and Hawk Mountain. We received a grant from the state of Pennsylvania for two years. I was able to hire Rebecca McCabe who conducted her master's degree on broad wing Hawks and then the state on with the project is now working here full time. She received her PhD working on snowy Alice, couple years ago. For the last 10 years we've been working on broad wing Hawks consistently and conducting what we call a full life cycle study. And what does that mean that means that we, we want to know what's going on with the bird during the breeding season that might fall migration the winter as well as the spring migration. And the reason for this is we don't really know at what point in the life cycle, these birds may be impacted so we want to understand what kinds of conservation threats, they're facing all throughout their life cycle. Well, if you think about the, before I say that, I would like to acknowledge this kind of study when you're talking about working throughout the life cycle for a long distance migrant, it takes a lot of effort. And I just want to thank a lot of the people that have been involved in the project, including the Harris Center for environmental education where Phil Brown works. So originally, our first four or five years we work exclusively in Pennsylvania and we were a lot of the results I'm going to be talking about today or some of the results are based on a lot of the data collected in Pennsylvania. Recently, we've expanded north and into different areas of the nesting range. And the reason for that is that it could be that the pressures faced in one part of the range may be different than those in other parts of the breeding range that we wanted to try to look at different areas. And also, we wanted to study their migration to see if they might be wintering in different areas or timing could be different for the migrants from different areas, or a whole host of different differences could be occurring from when birds are from different parts of the range. So how do we study broad ring hawks during the breeding season. Well, one of the first things we have to do is go out in the woods in the spring and try to find nests. And so we walk around in the woods we're scanning the trees looking for something like this that you see up in the upper right here, a bunch of sticks in the crotch of a tree, that's the beginning of a broad ring hawk nest. And of course we're looking for the birds as well we look for areas where the birds are hanging out by the male and female might be calling back and forth and that gives us a queue that they may be near a nest. And then later on we return and we hope to see something like this in early May where birds actually perched or incubating a little nest here broadlings don't build a real complicated nest it's often kind of ramshackle like you see here. And of course, nests can be difficult to find you can see here's three different nests photographs and three different nests and you can see that fewer walking through the woods that you might just walk right by and not notice this this nest over here or this nest over here. So they can be highly secretive. And then we go back and visit the nests, and we find, and we confirm whether they fled young how many young have been produced, and then proceed to take measurements on the nest site itself, particularly in Pennsylvania we've been, we've done quite a bit of studies on the net, the attributes of the nest, what trees they're using. And how big the trees are. We also collected data using cameras on several nests to look at what the birds were eating, and other behaviors. Here's a bottom you can see the bird holding a chipmunk in its talons over here a bird is has a bit of nest material and it's bill. And then there's some chicks on a nest here that would, we're a photograph using a camera. Our study period begins primarily in for the nesting season begins in April and goes through July. During these period we studied what the birds were eating. And we found out that the primarily primary prey item is small mammals, a whole mix of different things from mice to chipmunks to shrews. They also will take small birds often nestlings for nests, and then they do eat quite a bit of snakes and frogs and insects. We also are observations on the nests with cameras and with our with observers watching the nest for for the diurnal period discovered a very important thing that has conservation implications and that is that when after the nestlings hatch out of the eggs the nests reduce the amount of time they spend at the nest after the first week. So if you look at the proportion of daylight hours. Daylight period that the adults are at the nest in the first week of life that they're there a lot they're up to 70% of the daylight hours there's a one of one at least one parent at the nest. But right after that it drops dramatically and by the third week of life nestlings are left alone pretty much for most of the day. And of course one of the reasons for that is that both parents are needed to run to fly around and try to find prey to keep these guys fat and happy so it's a trade off that the broad wings are using is that they're putting their resources and their parental care into finding food, but at the same time that leaves these young birds exposed in the nest to things like predation. The nest trees broadening hawks primarily are using a wide variety of trees, oftentimes the one of the larger trees in the stand. We found them in both evergreen trees white pines hemlocks chestnut trees tulip trees birch and and on the average about two fledglings for each nest although we've had as many as four. The nest nest are usually in the top third of the tree about 50 feet high. When we look at what kinds of habitat broadening hawks are using it's primarily forest 82% of the area around a nest site is forested and 9% are wetlands. This is data from from Pennsylvania only we're looking forward to adding some of the other nest sites from New England to our data set. The proportion of wetlands around the nest and the proportion of evergreen forest 26% is much higher than you see normally in the Pennsylvania for us so they seem to like those lower elevation music areas which have a little bit of mixed evergreen and deciduous forest. So what we've been doing to try to better study our breeding birds is to capture them and ban them. And we're, we're using telemetry but we're also you for those birds that we don't have telemetry units on we're using color bands that then we trap them once and then we can follow them and see if they return year after year which is helpful in trying to understand survival and return rates of the adults. There will be a band on the leg of each of the birds in these photos here. So once the bird is banded even if they don't have a color band we can usually figure out if it's a returning bird. Now this is just an example of the kind of data we can collect with banded birds. These, this is a pair of birds Paula and Broone who we, we've tagged the male in 2014 and the female, a little bit later but she was very distinctive so we're confident they were together that they were together all the time. And we've been following them now for the full 10 years of the study. And I just put numbers here to show you all the different nest sites that they used. Broadwing Hawks do not return to the same nest every year they build a new nest, which makes it challenging if you're trying to study them. But the interesting thing about these this pair here is they've stayed together for this entire 10 year period. They return every year, and they moved around kind of in this little circle. So the first year, the second year, the third year, the fourth year, the fifth year then they moved across the road, sixth year, seventh year, eight, nine and then last year they returned to the same tree they used 10 years ago so we're hopeful that they're just going to follow this circle around and make our lives easier in terms of trying to find the nest. But it's great to be able to study birds that you've been monitoring for a long period of time and really get to understand their biology. This is a photograph of Rosalie who was who was trapped at Hawk Mountain, and you can see all her movements over a three year period she had a satellite unit on her that lasted about three years. And you're still able to see her bands more recently so she's been returning for at least four to six years now. And one of the things that we've been able to find about breeding nesting broadwing hawks by putting these transmitters on them is how large are their nesting breeding range. And this is a summary of data 18 female birds on the left and four male birds on the right. So what you can see is that the size of the breeding home range is about 10 times larger for the male compared to the female the female tends to stay very close to the nest during the nesting season but the male. He's really always foraging so he's traveling far and wide trying to find prey for the female when she's incubating eggs but also for the young after they hatch. The breeding home range looks like year after year the different colors or the different years. So this is three years of a nesting bird and over here is three years and here's two years. This bird here is from New Hampshire this is a male. These other three are females so the key factor here is to show you that the home range doesn't shift that much between years occasionally it gets bigger. For the most part, the birds are using the same area year after year, they're moving their nest around a little bit but it's always within that core area. So they're highly faithful to their breeding sites. Once they have a territory and a nest they come back year after year, unless they don't survive. Okay, the other aspect of our research was to try to understand their migration and their wintering period well in order to do that. So these long distance migrants that are migrating down to South America is we need to use satellite telemetry. So this is a photograph of a satellite telemetry unit that was that had been placed on a bird you can see it sitting on the back of the bird. It's attached to the backpack with a very fine Teflon ribbon, which is very smooth so it doesn't cause any abrasions on the birds feathers or on the skin. It can stay on the bird for a couple of years. And it gives us very precise locations on where the bird was along migration as well as in the winter. So you may say well how do we get these birds? I'll go you do a real quick demonstration of that. We have, whoops, we have these very fine misnets that we hang up. We hang up below a nest site. Once we've located a nest, we put some nets up and we sit in a blind with our binoculars and then we, we have this guy here who's our field assistant. We put him out next to the misnets, and we have remote control. We have remote control in the inside the blind that we can use to make the owl move. And then we also play a call of young owls or adult owls. And hopefully you can see we're looking out the blind window here. You can see the owl is moving his wings. And that gets the broad wings very upset because great horn owls are predators. So if they see a great horned owl near their nest, they're going to want to scare it away. And they'll call to get their attention. So then what happens next hopefully is, while the bird, the bird is getting angry at this owl is hopefully it gets caught in the net. And that's what happened right there. And took the owls, the owls head off too. And now we trapped the, the, the broad wing hawk, it's not 100% effective we get them about 30 to 40% of the time sometimes they're too smart or they don't come down low enough to get caught in the net. But once they're caught we do all kinds of measurements and study their, their molds, and then we, we put color bands on the bird so we don't have to trap them again and release them. And really enough we put a transmitter on usually only transmitters have been put on females. We do have a couple smaller transmitters that went on the males. But as you know, raptors females are larger so they're much more apt to be able to carry a transmitter. The transmitters are quite small they're about nine grams you can see one here. More recently we've been using this transmitter style here, which is doesn't ping off of satellite but pings off of cell towers. And then it downloads the data. If it's not near a cell tower it just stores the data, the location data on the bird and eventually it downloads it when it gets near a tower. So what happens oftentimes then is in the wintertime we don't, when they're down in the jungles of the Amazon we don't hear from them for a while but then when they start moving north, we get a whole bunch of data on where they were for the winter. So what a transmitter looks like when it's on the back it's very small has a little solar panel which allows it to recharge over the winter. So so far we put out about 27 different transmitters from different locations from as far north as Quebec, down south through Pennsylvania, we put on five in New Hampshire so far, and this past summer we put one on Vermont. So we seem to go back to both Quebec and Vermont to put on two more transmitters, each site, this coming summer. Only three males, which means we only have three transmitters that were small enough to put on a male. So what do we've been learning about Broadwings from this radio from the satellite tracking. So first of all, some of the interesting data is the first couple of years we did track a couple of juveniles like first year birds and you can see almost immediately that the juveniles didn't migrate as far as the adults, they were much much shorter migration than the adults. And I should say there's a couple of lines here from Alberta. There's three broadwing hawks that were tagged by the Smithsonian so we've mapped here as well. But the important thing is that most of the adults went into central most mostly adults went past Central America into South America or whereas most juveniles stayed farther north. As far as departure dates. Pennsylvania birds mostly left in late August whereas Alberta birds tended to leave a little bit later in early September. Look at how fast the birds were traveling Alberta birds traveled very fast. The fastest through the central United States whereas Pennsylvania birds were traveling fastest through northern Mexico. The fastest about 150 miles in a day so it's not maybe as fast as some people might have suspected they these are soaring birds so they're moving fairly slowly. When broadwing hawks take about 90 days to go from breeding site to wintery site so, and then it's another almost 90 days to return in the spring so they're spending about six months of the year in migration. And for adults, the distance they're moving can be up to 7000 miles whereas the juveniles appear to be migrating much shorter. All of the birds have very synchronous migration that appears we're starting to add to this data set but New Hampshire birds for example came through mostly in the second week of October, whereas Pennsylvania birds were mostly in the last part of September. Here's a compilation map of all the Pennsylvania birds and the Alberta birds, before we started tagging in New Hampshire. And you can see that the lease for the Alberta birds there appeared to be a little bit of a pattern of them going more into the northeastern part of South America, whereas our Pennsylvania birds were kind of scattered through the more southwestern or the northern part of South America but not as far east. And I'll give us a suggestion that maybe there was some migration connectivity or excuse me differences between the areas, the breeding areas. As far as where birds wintered, we found birds wintering in 10 different countries, Mexico, South through Bolivia. And when we were able to follow them for more than one year they tended to return to the same wintering areas. And high fidelity to their breeding areas, and high fidelity to their wintering areas. Now here's some bird some data from New Hampshire and Connecticut birds and one Ontario bird in green. And you can see that we're seeing a pretty similar pattern of spread spread in wintering areas between the different area between the different. Tickle, I guess the key point I'm trying to make is that there's not a big difference between where the birds are coming from we're seeing kind of a similar spread in where they're wintering. As we saw with the Pennsylvania birds, when we look at some of these birds from Canada, New Hampshire and Connecticut. We'll be looking at more in the next couple years but here's an example of an individual's movement this is a bird called see you home it was named by the donors nested in Connecticut, and these are two years of migration data. The bird went down in 2021 and wintered in at the border of Columbia and Venezuela there's kind of a zoomed in look here, and then migrated back north and then in this last year it migrated down into the same area. And this is a bird that has gone down and returned. We, we actually have the more of the return data now but this is hugger from Canada seem to be returning on the same pathway as she went down. And she wintered a little farther north than a lot of the other adults, as she she wintered in this somewhat urbanized area around Guatemala city. And this is a map of Muskoka who migrated down to Brazil. And one of the interesting things about Muskoka was that she might came down to a wintery site in Brazil. And then started wandering into Bolivia. And we wondered if if her movements, she would have stopped in Brazil if she hadn't encountered the deforestation that was going on in that area Brazil. And you can see that this is some deforestation data from a site called forest global forest watch, and this area in the square here is where she would have been she first landed in that first year and then she started wandering more into the green area. So we, we do we have seen several birds that have returned to their to to wintering areas and after there's been some cutting and see we've seen mostly wandering or moving away from that area. Let's see this is a skip. This is a, this is a bird from New Hampshire. Two birds from New Hampshire one was Thelma, they nested very close together what but different nest sites, not they weren't paired together in 2021 but the interesting thing is that they ended up in vastly different areas of South America. Nor the Harris the one in pink was wintered farther north in Columbia whereas Thelma ended up in Brazil. She reached is, is wintering grounds in Columbia on the 25th of October but Thelma spent a whole nother month in migration and went down to Brazil so we're seeing quite a variety of different patterns. But if you do a little circle around all the Pennsylvania adults, you can see that they're mostly nesting in this north, north, Western sector of South America. Other Ontario birds are somewhat following that same area maybe a little bit more to the east. Now, some of our broad wings that we we marked from Pennsylvania have wintered very close together but also, but in opposite to what I showed you about those two New Hampshire birds. They nested hundreds of miles apart but on their wintering grounds are only about 85 miles apart. So, we're seeing both patterns this is an area of southern Peru or three different females for Pennsylvania wintered. So we're seeing high winter site fidelity. When we've been able to get repeat track trips on a bird they end up returning to the same area. This is a Harris from New Hampshire he's using exactly the same area of northern Columbia. One of his wintering area it's highly very rough topography, a lot of. Okay, so some of the other things that we're learning about their migration is not only where they're, they're wintering and how their path through the, through the migration route, but some of the challenges they might be encountering as well. This is a zoomed in shot of of two birds that were returning to Canada, Ontario, and they came up a little bit farther west than they went down on migration so they, they both flew up north in Illinois and they hit Lake Michigan over here and then went up the far side of the, of the lake, then one of them, the one in red here, figured out what was going on turned around and went back south and then kind of tried to go north again, hit this lake Lake on her on and then eventually was able to find a way to get back to Ontario. But the other bird spent up, but almost a week, two weeks. Roaming around this lake shore of Lake Michigan trying to figure out a way to cross tried to cross this area then turned around and went farther into Wisconsin and then finally went around the north side of the lake. But it was a little bit painful to watch her progress because she kept, she would not go to go to the south like the other bird and figure out a way to cross there she kept trying to go up the lake shore. We studied their wintering areas a little bit and we're finding that there are some patterns that most of the habitat that the birds are using are these large forested areas, what we call sub montane lowland evergreen tropical forests. Some of these areas are threatened by deforestation and forest fires and mining. They're not all being heavily threatened some of it's just light threads but it is there is human threats occurring in these areas. And once the birds are facing on migration, we know firsthand from some of the hawk mountain trainees that are working in Columbia and other places where they're actively shooting for migrating birds such as these swings and talk that you see here. And also, because broadwing hawks are forest birds we were wondering if they need forest on their migration to stop and rest and feed, and how that might impact them. We're starting to try to look at habitat use in winter migration and nesting periods. This is just an example of what a stopover might look like for a bird this is one of the juveniles that was tagged, we spent about 10 days wandering around this southern area of Mexico and you can see clearly that they're moving around probably trying to feed during that period. So stopovers are probably fairly important to these birds and being able to find good patches of forest where they can find food and rest and get ready for their next journey. We've seen we've seen some fidelity when we've been able to track birds for multiple years to some of the stopovers sites this is an area of Shenandoah National Park which Sadie this female from Eastern Pennsylvania stopped in at least twice. And then she also stopped in a plate one place in Columbia three times on her down and back journeys. And we went. We're preliminarily are looking at stopover sites but we're going to be doing a much more in depth look at habitat and how long they spend it in different sites. In the near future. So what's next with this research. Well one of the things we want to really dive in on is this migration connectivity, because some of the populations are declining but not all of them we want to see if the population if the population areas where birds are notably declining might be wintering in certain areas maybe in those areas of Brazil where they're deforested. Right now our data suggests that's not an issue that that there's pretty wide overlap for the different populations but we need to get data from different areas. And we're going to be analyzing the habitat use data in the very near future now that we have good nesting data from New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. We're going to try to look at that a little bit more. And of course looking at stopover habitat and how trying to evaluate how important that is, and then trying to understand, you know what are the key conservation threats in the different parts of their life cycle. There are some interesting behaviors that we've discovered that we want to understand more fully. And one of those is what we call pre migration movements. We've, we've found at least three of the females that we tagged in female in Pennsylvania, did what we call a pre migration movement where they were nesting here throughout the summer then as soon as their young fledged and left the nest, the female departs and she leaves the male in charge of teaching the young how to forage and how to find prey. And she goes somewhere completely different like this bird went about 50 kilometers up to the northwest and hung out for a while moved around. This bird here went about 30 kilometers to the northwest and hung out for a while. So the, they're doing what we call a, almost like taking a little vacation before their migration period. And we found this also for the New Hampshire birds we had three of the New Hampshire birds do a pre migration movement and one of them was amazing. The two, two to key went all the way from Southern New Hampshire all the way into Quebec for a couple of weeks before she started back on our migration south. She traveled 160 miles into Vermont, New, New Benson traveled about 130 miles to New York State, and Scott to butchering the name here Scott to the key traveled over 300 miles into Quebec. So that's pretty amazing journey and why would they do that why would they leave where they were nesting go to this completely different place, abandoning their young to the male. And the theory behind this has been proposed for Osprey which do this in Europe is that the female leaves the nesting territory to allow the, the young the best chance of finding praise, because if she's not there, eating prey there's going to be more prey for the young, and that but it keeps, but the male stays because somebody has to teach the young how to hunt. This year, we were tracking Scott to the P. She also did a pre migration but to a different place, which is very interesting as well. So we want to study these new behaviors a little bit more. We've developed some educational materials which we'd like to try to get out. This curriculum is unavailable on our website for teachers. And we've been collaborating with Audubon's migratory bird initiative and they have some really cool information on Audubon website that you can look up that's based on our data. And we have a very active Facebook page which you can like and get posts. We tried to do period post updating on the migration. We've been collaborating with the Nature Conservancy as well to try to contribute our data to to their information on where birds need to be protected in the Central American corridor. So I'm going to leave it there and open it to questions I want to thank a lot of the donors which have supported both the work in Pennsylvania but also the work in in New Hampshire. Thank our partners the Harris Center and VINs and Vermont Institute. And all of our wonderful volunteers that help find nests and monitor nests we couldn't do this without them so like to thank you all and open it for questions. Thank you Lori. Excuse me. That was great. Very interesting. I have several questions for you. And I'll start with one from Dan Gardoki who I mentioned earlier was a tracker. He thanks you for being here. And for your work and dedication. He's curious about how forest pathogens and the decline of certain tree species, such as hemlock and ash, maybe impacting broad winged ecology. Yeah. So our, our studies, I would say are somewhat preliminary and that we found that them to be somewhat of a generalist in terms of what trees they're using for nesting, but they do like evergreen patches I think they like the variety of deciduous and evergreen together. So a decline in hemlocks probably would, you know, affect might affect the prey availability that not could affect them. The other aspect that can affect them is they are kind of a small hawk. So one of their biggest predators are larger raptors like great horned owls and red tail hawks, and when the forest opens up by when there's, you know, kills of patches of trees that can open up and some of these more generalist predators can move in there. So that could be a threat, but I think in general they'll probably adapt pretty well would be my guess but except for the happen then of those kind of landscape changes which could be a problem. In your, you gave that one example of the bird being hesitant to fly over water and doing quieter and run there. Is that fairly typical for broad wing hawks. Yeah, yeah they are soaring migrant so they want to have thermals and the thermals are going to be much more common over land so they tend to avoid crossing water. And in that one case you know it was pretty dramatic that the bird, you know, soon as it's got a couple kilometers over the water turned around went back. And I actually just heard from some folks in Kate may that put transmitters on young broad wings and in Kate main New Jersey which is a peninsula where the birds have to cross the water or travel, you know 50 miles inland before they go south. And a couple of their birds ended up in the ocean and they tried to cross the water so it's pretty much. It's, it's very, it's very common for broad wings to avoid water and that's why they concentrated in Veracruz, Mexico because they're all funneling down through that land corridor through Central America to get to South America. And how, how many of hawk species are that tied to thermals. And yeah, not all of them and the peregrine falcons and harriers and Osprey and kites will go across the water and they're pretty well adapted to figure that lift situation out. And here soaring birds like Swainsons Hawk broad wings, red tail Hawks are going to avoid the water. So any bird that likes to soar rather than flap is going to be avoiding water peregrine falcons don't seem to mind. And there are strategies for crossing water that can that some of the birds appear to be using. If they can get up really high and get into a stream of air that's going in the direction they want to go, they can get like a little tailwind at the higher altitude that can carry them, you know, right over some water bodies but broad wings are not really designed that way they're more designed to let the air carry them up and up and then glide to the next thermal so they're very dependent upon thermals. Looking at that picture on the screen of the white chicks are all of them white initially and how long does that last. Yes, they're all fluffy white cute little guys to start and then they start putting on brown feathers you can kind of see here this guy starting to get some brown here and there. You might remember one of the photos I had earlier where they're mostly brown so they. I would say by three weeks or so they start to get more brown feathers and by, you know, 68 weeks they're they're pretty feathered out the last the last feathers they get, or the tail feathers but. It all happens pretty, pretty quickly. We have one question asking about how to what degree work with a bird either in terms of. Entering data into a bird or making use of data that's there. Yes, we use e bird, particularly early in when we're going to somewhere new like in Vermont. Okay back. We look at e bird to see where people have been reporting sightings of broad wings during the nesting season so that gives us an idea of where we might start looking for nests. We use e bird. It hasn't been completely reliable for us all times but it is very helpful. Early in the nesting season at least give us a tip on possible places to go. And then I used e bird a lot for another paper which I didn't mention here but. You may remember, as I said that the three juveniles that we tagged wintered in Central America, whereas all the adults, mostly adults wintered in South America, so it looked like young birds are not migrating as far. I wanted to look at that in more depth so I looked at all the e bird data from Central and South America and mapped, you know the young, young birds versus adults to see if that pattern held up. What is the, I'm sorry. No go ahead. What is the lifespan of typically of Broadway. It's probably about 20 years or so. Yeah, we've had, and they do return every year to their nest site so when they don't come back, we can pretty much assume that they're, you know they didn't make it migration is the time period when birds are most likely to undergo some kind of threats and maybe not make it that we have lost some birds during the nesting season to predators. All, you know all throughout their threats throughout the whole life cycle as with any bird but in migration you can imagine, especially for a long distance migrate you have your normal threats, like storms and winds and maybe not having enough food and all this. But then you have your abnormal or new threats such as, you know, climate change bringing more storms or winter binds or whatever it is. So there's, or shooting shooting is not has not gone away in Central America. Are there plans to track birds that are nesting in Maine. We have to do Hampshire, and we feel a little. Yes. We are, we'd like to work with others on this kind of project because we do have to, in order to trap the birds we have to find nest so we need people on the ground to help find nests. And then you maybe you know help a little bit with the expenses. So like in New Hampshire Phil Brown has a team of volunteers that go out every year and find the nests. And it's not easy I mean these birds I said are highly secretive but if we if there was a group of volunteers that wanted to try to find a nest some nests in an area where we could do some trapping like public lands or private lands where they know people. We would definitely want to come to Maine I had talked to somebody about working up around Acadia at one point but we just never got it organized so it's on my mind to try to come to Maine at some point. Yeah well we'd sort of love to hear about any plants like that that would be great I have one final question, which has to do with those, the pictures of the thousands of birds in the sky. Can you describe what it's like attempting to get account for those that kind of site, citing. Yeah. It's very exciting of course. If you haven't been to Veracruz Mexico or Kecaldi Costa Rica I highly recommend it it's just. It's like somebody was comparing it the other day to the wildebeest migration in Africa you know it's just this phenomenon when these birds are moving through and such high numbers. Counting down there though is not like we're counting them here, where we can actually count them individually, even on a 3000 bird day at Hawk Mountain we can pretty much count each individual bird as it passes over. Down there, you know the flight is so concentrated that what they're, they train their observers to be able to estimate numbers, just like shorebird and waterfowl biologists do at the coast where they get huge flocks they have to estimate numbers. So they take the flock and they say the broadwing flock and they'll say okay this is what 10 birds look like, and then they just, as the birds are passing over they go 1020. So they're counting them by 10s or they're counting them by 20s. So there is an estimation error involved with that. There's been studies that have shown that that error is generally on the downside so that you tend to underestimate more than you tend to overestimate. The numbers you can see on hawkcount.org if you're interested for some of these tropical sites. And it is pretty amazing to see that flock luckily I don't have the job of counting them I just go down and I watch them and let the young guys that are doing the hard work of counting them. Take care of that business. Well thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you for that short notice. We greatly appreciate it we loved your program. And best of luck with everything you're working on. Well thank you very much for having me and I'm happy to be here and yeah if you're interested in any more information there, Cock Mountain has a lot of information on our website about the broadwing research so. So thank you very much. And best wishes to everyone zooming in for happy holidays and the new year, and we'll see you in the new year. Thank you and good night everyone. Bye. Bye.