Hawks and Herons

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Broad-winged Hawk Kettle

            “Over there by the two smokestacks.”

“A Kettle!”

            “Look at them!”

            “There must be over 200 of them!”

The hushed whispers around us reflected the excitement that we and the group of birders around us were feeling as we watched the distant kettle of broad-winged hawks that had just been spotted. The morning had been slow, with only a few sharp shinned hawks flying through, so suddenly seeing a large group of hawks seemingly materialize out of thin air was a cause for excitement. We had hoped that the kettle would move closer, but it stayed pretty far away. 


Hawk Migration Paths Around the Great Lakes

I was watching these birds over the lower Detroit River on the U.S./Canada border. (red circle in the map picture) Large kettles, or groups, of various types of hawks, form in this area as they migrate south in the fall. The thermals they travel on don't form over the Great Lakes so they are forced to go around the lakes. If they travel down through Ontario south of Lake Huron and north of Lake Erie, they have to cross the Detroit River. Every year a count is conducted in this area by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies to determine the number of hawks, eagles, falcons, and vultures passing through from September to November.



Broad-winged Hawk Kettle Video

Over the course of the next several hours we saw two more kettles of broad-winged hawks, neither as large as the first. We decided to check out the booths set up for the Hawk Watch event and got to watch two cooper's hawks be released.


Cooper's Hawk Being Released After Being Banded

We birded for a while longer at the Lake Erie Metropark, then decided to go exploring and see if we could find another place to go birding. We ended up at Detroit River National Wildlife Refuge. 


Double-Crested Cormorant Rookery

At first when we got out of the car it didn’t look like there was much there, but as we were walking I spotted a cormorant rookery next to the same two smoke stacks that we had seen the first kettle of hawks over. There weren’t any cormorants in the nests at this point in the season, but the limbs of the trees were still lined with them. We found a short path that took us directly under the rookery. We had to be careful not to brush up against the vegetation, as it was all coated in white courtesy of the birds perched above us. 

Double-Crested Cormorant
    As we were following the path out onto a peninsula with a narrow swamp on one side and the main river on the other, someone commented that this would be a great spot for black-crowned night herons. Literally minutes later one was spotted perched on a branch across the narrow swamp. We instantly began snapping pictures and creeping closer until we were almost directly opposite of it. After a few minutes it flew a little farther down with its following of young birders eagerly trailing behind.

Black-crowed Night Heron

We started photographing again and realized that there were two pairs of red eyes looking back at us instead of one as we had originally thought. A second heron was hidden almost entirely in a small tree not too far from where the first one had landed. The pair was scared off by the shouts of some people fishing nearby, and we returned back through the rookery and up the trail to the car and headed home, pleased with the looks and shots we had gotten of both the hawks and herons.



Pair of Wood Ducks and a Black Duck Mute Swan

Bald Eagle Female Mallard Duck

Second Black-crowned Night Heron Double-crested Cormorants

Double-crested Cormorant

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