Do Summer temperatures slow raptor migration? #phenology

A hummingbird showed up at the feeder yesterday. Perhaps with today's temperatures in the mid-80's it thinks Summer has returned. Further North, numbers of raptors should be heading South over Hawk Ridge in Duluth. The migration timing shown below is from several years ago, but we doubt if there's been much change.

Hawk Ridge raptor migration timing

Photo by J. Harrington

Candidly, we haven't been paying much attention to the wind directions near Duluth but, if you're headed in that direction, you might want to check the wind and weather forecast to see if you can pick a better day to visit Hawk Ridge.

Hawk Ridge raptor migration pattern

Photo by J. Harrington

This Saturday there'll be an Indigenous Foods Expo in Duluth, so, if you're looking for an excuse to head in that direction, now you have one. As if anyone needed excuses to head up North and see Lake Superior at this time of year!

(We spent a couple of hours in the dentist chair today so our posting is short and sweet. We need a nap or something.)

The Hawk's Cry in Autumn

By Joseph Brodsky

Wind from the northwestern quarter is lifting him high above

the dove-gray, crimson, umber, brown

Connecticut Valley. Far beneath,

chickens daintily pause and move

unseen in the yard of the tumbledown

farmstead, chipmunks blend with the heath.

Now adrift on the airflow, unfurled, alone,

all that he glimpses—the hills’ lofty, ragged

ridges, the silver stream that threads

quivering like a living bone

of steel, badly notched with rapids,

the townships like strings of beads

strewn across New England. Having slid down to nil

thermometers—those household gods in niches—

freeze, inhibiting thus the fire

of leaves and churches’ spires. Still,

no churches for him. In the windy reaches,

undreamt of by the most righteous choir,

he soars in a cobalt-blue ocean, his beak clamped shut,

his talons clutched tight into his belly

—claws balled up like a sunken fist—

sensing in each wisp of down the thrust

from below, glinting back the berry

of his eyeball, heading south-southeast

to the Rio Grande, the Delta, the beech groves and farther still:

to a nest hidden in the mighty groundswell

of grass whose edges no fingers trust,

sunk amid forest’s odors, filled

with splinters of red-speckled eggshell,

with a brother or a sister’s ghost.

The heart overgrown with flesh, down, feather, wing,

pulsing at feverish rate, nonstopping,

propelled by internal heat and sense,

the bird goes slashing and scissoring

the autumnal blue, yet by the same swift token,

enlarging it at the expense

of its brownish speck, barely registering on the eye,

a dot, sliding far above the lofty

pine tree; at the expense of the empty look

of that child, arching up at the sky,

that couple that left the car and lifted

their heads, that woman on the stoop.

But the uprush of air is still lifting him

higher and higher. His belly feathers

feel the nibbling cold. Casting a downward gaze,

he sees the horizon growing dim,

he sees, as it were, the features

of the first thirteen colonies whose

chimneys all puff out smoke. Yet it’s their total within his sight

that tells the bird of his elevation,

of what altitude he’s reached this trip.

What am I doing at such a height?

He senses a mixture of trepidation

and pride. Heeling over a tip

of wing, he plummets down. But the resilient air

bounces him back, winging up to glory,

to the colorless icy plane.

His yellow pupil darts a sudden glare

of rage, that is, a mix of fury

and terror. So once again

he turns and plunges down. But as walls return

rubber balls, as sins send a sinner to faith, or near,

he’s driven upward this time as well!

He! whose innards are still so warm!

Still higher! Into some blasted ionosphere!

That astronomically objective hell

of birds that lacks oxygen, and where the milling stars

play millet served from a plate or a crescent.

What, for the bipeds, has always meant

height, for the feathered is the reverse.

Not with his puny brain but with shriveled air sacs

he guesses the truth of it: it’s the end.

And at this point he screams. From the hooklike beak

there tears free of him and flies ad luminem

the sound Erinyes make to rend

souls: a mechanical, intolerable shriek,

the shriek of steel that devours aluminum;

“mechanical,” for it’s meant

for nobody, for no living ears:

not man’s, not yelping foxes’,

not squirrels’ hurrying to the ground

from branches; not for tiny field mice whose tears

can’t be avenged this way, which forces

them into their burrows. And only hounds

lift up their muzzles. A piercing, high-pitched squeal,

more nightmarish than the D-sharp grinding

of the diamond cutting glass,

slashes the whole sky across. And the world seems to reel

for an instant, shuddering from this rending.

For the warmth burns space in the highest as

badly as some iron fence down here

brands incautious gloveless fingers.

We, standing where we are, exclaim

“There!” and see far above the tear

that is a hawk, and hear the sound that lingers

in wavelets, a spider skein

swelling notes in ripples across the blue vault of space

whose lack of echo spells, especially in October,

an apotheosis of pure sound.

And caught in this heavenly patterned lace,

starlike, spangled with hoarfrost powder,

silver-clad, crystal-bound,

the bird sails to the zenith, to the dark-blue high

of azure. Through binoculars we foretoken

him, a glittering dot, a pearl.

We hear something ring out in the sky,

like some family crockery being broken,

slowly falling aswirl,

yet its shards, as they reach our palms, don’t hurt

but melt when handled. And in a twinkling

once more one makes out curls, eyelets, strings,

rainbowlike, multicolored, blurred

commas, ellipses, spirals, linking

heads of barley, concentric rings—

the bright doodling pattern the feather once possessed,

a map, now a mere heap of flying

pale flakes that make a green slope appear

white. And the children, laughing and brightly dressed,

swarm out of doors to catch them, crying

with a loud shout in English, “Winter's here!”

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