I recently took some equipment to the Florida Keys Hawkwatch site at Curry Hammock State Park in Marathon. It was officially the first day of the season and my friend Rafael Galvez, the project leader, was there, along with one of the new counters, Adrianna Nelson. It was her first day.
This is the 25th anniversary of the start of the Florida Keys Hawkwatch, which traditionally began in early September. The goal of the project is to monitor populations of birds of prey — hawks, hawks, kites, eagles, ospreys, vultures, etc. — that migrate through the Keys. Curry Hammock State Park is a great place to observe, as hawks prefer to fly over land as long as possible on their way to the Caribbean and more southerly destinations, because the shorter the water crossing, the safer it is. Little Crawl Key and its neighbor Long Point Key are only about a mile wide together, meaning you’ll be able to see most of the birds flying by.
This year, however, the falcon observation will no longer begin at the beginning of September, but for the third time at the beginning of August. The reason? Forked harriers, which usually migrate about a month earlier than the rest of the birds of prey and whose migration routes have not yet been studied.
I’ve been spending time at hawk watching since the early days, when it took place on the back deck of the bathhouse in the middle of the Curry Hammock campground, which was basically a treeless gravel lot with RV hookups. It still takes place on the back deck of the bathhouse in the middle of the Curry Hammock campground, although the back deck is about twice the size it used to be and the gravel lot is now full of healthy looking trees, some of which are as tall as the bathhouse if not taller, making it a little harder to track the raptors flying overhead. (Somehow I manage to be surprised every year at how tall the trees have gotten.)
Rafael and Adrianna hadn’t seen many birds of prey yet—three turkey vultures and three ospreys—and it was unlikely they would see any in the next few days, as Debby, a tropical storm of some sort, was moving north and would be there by the next morning at the latest.
Rafael would stay there for a few days before he had to head north and attend to other tasks, and Adrianna would have to do the counting on her own for about a week until the two additional counters arrived from other fieldwork assignments. But there was no great need to worry. Adrianna was obviously smart. She was the American Birding Association’s Young Birder of the Year in 2020. She was also kind enough to laugh at our jokes.
The only thing that worried me was the boredom she would have to endure when the number of raptors was low, even though there were other birds to see. Hundreds of Barn Swallows and Purple Martins, a few Cliff Swallows and a handful of early migrants had passed through that day and would probably be less moody than the raptors if the weather was right.
While Florida Keys Hawkwatch is the first project to begin monitoring migratory swallowtails as they pass through South Florida, they are not the only ones trying to track swallowtails on their migration. The folks at the Gainesville-based Avian Research and Conservation Institute (ARCI) have been catching individual swallowtails and attaching small tracking devices to them for over a decade.
The latest technology they use is GPS trackers from Cellular Tracking Technologies, which record location data and then transmit it over cellular networks when they come into contact with them. On August 2 (the day I was at Curry Hammock), ARCI released a map showing the locations of their dozen tagged kites. Most of them were in Florida, but two of them had already flown over to Mexico and landed in the Quintana Roo area on their way to wintering in Brazil.
On August 5, as the storm named Debby reached the coast of the Panhandle, they posted about the bird, named Suwannee 22, which woke up on August 3 with “tailwinds that should have carried it easily across the Gulf of Mexico to the traditional stopover of migratory kites on the Yucatan Peninsula.”
The post’s headline was “Weathering the Storm,” the first reference to the REO Speedwagon that I’ve seen in ornithological circles.
About 60 miles north of Cuba, she apparently encountered strong winds – the winds of Debby – and was unable to move forward. “Suwannee 22 decided to go with the current,” wrote ARCI’s senior conservation scientist Gina Kent.
She rode the storm’s winds northward for twelve hours, and by 6 p.m. on August 4 she was within 72 kilometers of the coast of St. Petersburg. From there she tried in vain for four hours to reach the shore.
Kent believes she sought refuge in a different type of accommodation.
“Given the timestamps of her subsequent GPS track and Debby’s radar-based trajectory, we are fairly certain that Suwannee 22 was riding along in the developing eye of the storm. It appears that against all odds, the two made landfall simultaneously in Steinhatchee, a remote outpost in Florida’s Big Bend. At 8 a.m. on August 5, Suwannee 22 was overland in the Big Bend Wildlife Management Area, likely resting after being blown over and flying through the treetops, searching for a safe place,” Kent wrote.
That was less than 60 miles from where she first placed her satellite tracker.
After this harrowing journey, Suwannee 22 will no doubt need to rest and recharge before heading south again, but Kent says they will report back once she’s back on the road. (You can follow her posts on Facebook and her website, arcinst.org.)
Interestingly, the next day, Adrianna Nelson sent out a message with a photo in the Hawkwatch text string reporting an “insane (hawk-knight) tornado” of about 600 birds in a single bowl.
I told her she had overdone it a bit her first week. She said it was the dragons’ fault.
Weather permitting, the stalls will be at Curry Hammock every day from now until the end of October. Stop by. You never know what you’ll see.
