Kettles of Broad-winged Hawks on Fall Migration

I stood still and gazed out at the green hills around me. They rested gently together, layered like a wrinkled carpet, worn and ragged from ages of tramping by gigantic gods. They stretched into the far edges of my eyesight, where here and there a massive mountain would rise, reduced to a tiny mole hill on the canvas of a much vaster horizon.

Here the sky was the true world, and you no longer wondered why men thought the ancient gods dwelt there, looking down on the downtrodden earth from their cities in the clouds. I began to shudder at the thought of one appearing, setting a giant's heel down on trees and creatures alike. The trees might spring back like moss, but a single creature like me would be squashed into the soil to become fodder for the worms.

There are creatures who fly in this dome of sky, and we are watching for them as they come out of the horizon and zoom past us on wings we cannot ride. The legend say that a bold young man called Icarus tried to ride into the sky with borrowed wings, but the sun dissolved the waxen sinews and sent him spiraling down.

The birds grew wings from their flesh and reached the heavens on their own, but found no cities there, or gods either. Although they have mastered the art of flight, even the eagles and hawks are still small and lost in this world of air, but they use it as their pathway to other lands and places.

We sit atop Blueberry Hill in Granville in the middle of September and wait for a glimpse of these creatures as they follow a path to a second home in the tropics. The sun warms the earth quickly and the earth warms the air close to it. The warmed air rises into the space above it and the cold air falls on all sides of this temporary rising column.

This is a called a thermal, and the hawks use it to find a higher place in the sky without beating those wings and burning their precious fat supply. Each hawk launches from the trees where it spent the night when the thermals died the previous afternoon, then looks for the morning lift.

For the common broad-winged hawk of the Northeast, this means sky-pooling, for they need each other’s help to find the thermals and use them to reach a tropical clime. We see these broadwings just above the horizon, first one or two, then a dozen, all circling around each other with set wings in the warm column.

After an hour, the thermals grow stronger and the hawks rise higher, now overhead and joined together in larger groups. At several hundred feet, they disappear from the naked eye even as they fly overhead, so we scan with our ten-power glasses and suddenly they reappear from nowhere.

Now there are thirty, fifty, a hundred, and sometimes several hundred, all soaring around in a cylinder of invisible air, as if caught in a boiling kettle. When they reach the top where the air finally cools and stops its rise, they spill out in lines over the kettle's rim, all heading in one direction. The image is so clear, we call these groups of circling hawks, kettles.

We count them as they glide silently overhead, small specks in a stream, all aimed at the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. When they are gone and the sky is empty again, we note the numbers on our sheets and wait for the next appearance of this vision.

On a clear day when the birds can find thermals, there may be only a few minutes before the next kettle, and by the end of the day perhaps several thousand hawks will have passed over. We don't know for sure what day or hour they may come, so we watch and wait, staring into that all too often empty world of air. Often their path is to our east or west, drifted by strong winds, and we only see a mere handful.

Many or a few is what we see, but how do we feel? We feel awed by a gift seldom granted, a vision of small struggling life in a huge universe. The world is so great, and despite their numbers these birds seem few and fragile indeed, but they always come, and our spirits rise with them into the blue.