migration

 Pupa graduated to butterfly on Saturday, matriculated on Sunday.

Last time I saw him he was heading west under the treeline. Good luck and safe travels!

The wind was blowing out of the north on Friday so I headed up to Mt. Philo with my binoculars to try my hand observing the raptor migration. When I got to the top of Mt. Philo, there was nobody there. It looked like it had been a long drive for nothing. But a man who looked like he might be the caretaker there saw my binoculars, and asked if I was there for the raptor migration, and when I said yes he pointed me to another location on the north side of the mountain (it's really not a mountain, it's a hill) where the action was.

When I got there, there were 3-4 people with binoculars. 

It started out slow, but as the day warmed, the raptors started to appear; hawks, eagles, kestrels, osprey. Some were low in the sky, and some were very high. Bearing witness to these birds on the move is a very compelling experience. The closest I can come to explaining it is that this urge for migrating is a very powerful instinct in this world of ours that is mostly a mystery to human beings. It's there and we can see it but we really can't feel it, it's a mystery. I saw about 50 raptors  that day with about 30 hawks in a single formation of sorts being the highlight.

As is often the case, the people who were there with me were real birders. They knew a lot, so I learned a lot. For Vermonters, the peak of the season should be occurring next weekend or so. Most of the activity occurs when the wind is out of the north, but not the northwest. The birds are heading southwest to Texas and beyond so they don't move when the wind is out of the west. The most activity occurs during the heat of the day, between 10 and 2. Cloud cover is good as it provides a background to help with the seeing. Some of the raptors will try to pick off migrating dragonflies that might be in the skies heading south at the same time. And there is a resident population that stays all year long. More on that tomorrow.