Lise and I did a quick trip back to Pennsylvania to see my sister Lynn and brother-in-law Jack. Jack is in the last stages of cancer and probably down to a couple weeks. He’s going into the VA hospice unit today. His dog Nick has been at loose ends without Jack around so I took him in to the hospital to see Jack. It was good for both of them. Hard not to get emotional when they saw each other.
Jack and Nick
On the lighter side, we did a side trip to the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. Hawk Mountain is a great example of a single person seeing something wrong and taking action. Hawk Mountain is part of the Kittaning ridge line, a major hawk migration route. During the season, hundreds of thousands of hawks migrate past the sanctuary. In the early 1900s, the North Lookout was used as a place to shoot migrating hawks out of the sky. The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation even paid a bounty for dead goshawks. Thousands of raptors were killed every season. Then Rosalie Edge, a New York conservationist, got sick of the carnage. She bought the lookout and barred shooters. Early on she met a lot of resistance but she persevered. The sanctuary has gone from preventing hawk massacres to an active educational and research program. They have partners and interns from all over the world, and are internationally recognized as an example of how to protect migrating raptors. Interestingly, I grew up less than an hour from Hawk Mountain but never heard of it until years after I left the area. Going back after taking up birding I got my life goshawk there.
Lise and I haven’t been there for over 15 years. Things just haven’t been conducive to getting out there during migration. Like a kid in school at the prime migration time. So we tried a quick outing this trip. Luck wasn’t with us this. We didn’t have much time to spend, it’s late in the migration season and the weather conditions were not very conducive to migration. Had a few sharpshin hawks fly over not much else. Still, it was nice to be sitting on the North Lookout rocks and taking it all in.
Hawk Mountain, late season view from the North Lookout.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 