Hawkwatch in Cape May, New Jersey

If migrating songbirds manage to avoid a watery grave when they overshoot the coastline, they still have to find their way back inland to richer sources of food. On the other hand, the bird-eating hawks already have the richest supply of food they will ever find. The hawks may not like the water either, but those lost, desperate songbirds sure make an easier and still tasty meal.

Hawks migrate during the daylight hours, so early morning at a migrant trap like Cape May, New Jersey brings songbirds and hawks out together, both heading north along the western or bay shore of this southward jutting peninsula.

If the wind is steady and strong from the northwest for two or three days, many hawks are kept close to the New Jersey coast as they move south. When they reach the point, they are faced with a long crossing over Delaware Bay, which some are reluctant to attempt.

They are happier with the steady lift of warmer air rising right along the shoreline where it meets the cooler ocean air. At the point stands a lighthouse and a huge wooden platform, where the hawk watchers stand to see this spectacle of hundreds of hawks flying just above their heads.

Just two miles north our group of bird watchers could not help but also see them as we walked the fields of the Higbee Beach Preserve. On this October morning, a steady stream of flickers and sapsuckers was also pushing north. They flew quickly on strong beating wings, occasionally stopping in a treetop for a short rest.

The hawks here were detouring from their southward route, hoping for a shorter crossing up the bay. They rode into the buffeting head wind, gliding and flapping slowly but relentlessly north. They were mostly sharp-shinned hawks and Cooper's Hawks, shaped and plumaged almost exactly alike but different in size.

The larger Cooper's hawks were very willing to make a meal of a vulnerable woodpecker, so occasionally we would see one dive upon a flicker, trying to grasp it before it made the safety of a tree. If it came close and the flicker had to take evasive or defensive action, we heard a hoarse, screaming call none of us had never heard before.

The attacks usually failed, because most of these hawks were immature birds, still tentative and clumsy in their attempts at capturing prey. Young birds hatched this year find themselves in migrant traps more often than older, experienced birds.

Later in the morning we joined others at the hawkwatch platform and kept our eyes to the skies, viewing the hawks as they approached the point. The ospreys, bald eagles and harriers would set a steady course across the mouth of the bay, heading for landfall at Cape Henlopen, Delaware.

The small broad-winged hawks would hesitate, circling slowly in the last thermal lift, drifting inexorably toward the Atlantic Ocean, then gliding away from it and repeating the circling process until they were high enough in the sky to risk the long glide to Delaware.

Many of the sharp-shinned hawks would also get as high as possible before they took off, but many would turn and head north. Not far away was a banding station, where the first-year birds would be tempted by starlings tethered to one more trap the hawks have to endure.

They are caught in nets when they dive or pounce on the prey until workers free them to be weighed, measured, banded and released. They have banded 100,000 hawks over the last twenty years and only 1,500 have ever been found again. A meager return for sure, but the only way to track individual birds and learn more about how and where they migrate.

Instead of banding, some are now radio-tagged and tracked by satellite. Three Pennsylvania broad-winged hawks were tagged early in September this year. Two weeks later, two of them were in east Texas, and just a few days ago they were in Nicaragua, safe in a tropical home.

The third bird did not even start the trip and likely has succumbed to starvation. Migration may be long and harrowing, but it is the only course of survival for many birds of the air.