Hawk watchers keep an eye on the sky

“Birds,” Jake Bramante yells out, binoculars to his eyes. “I’’ll stay on the high ones.”

“I’ll stay low,” Josh Covill replies.

“I’ll stay middle,” says Pam Willison.

The trio are expert birders, perched on a ridge in the Jewel Basin Hiking Area.

On the west side is the broad expanse of the Flathead Valley and Flathead Lake. On the east side, the Jewel Basin itself and beyond that, the Hungry Horse Reservoir and the Flathead Range.

A sharp-shinned hawk buzzes past, a good 500 feet above the ridge.

“Sharpie,” Bramante says.

And another and another.

“We just hit 60 birds,” Covill announces.

It’s about 3 p.m. Partly cloudy, a light breeze. The birds are moving, heading south. In less than a half hour the count is up to 82.

It’s a good day for counting raptors. The site is part of the Hawk Watch International Network of sites. Hawk Watch International was founded almost 50 years ago by Steve Hoffman in the Wellsville Mountains of Northern Utah as an early effort to track migrating raptors and get estimates on the health of raptor populations.

Hawk Watch International sites over the years have documented declines in both golden eagles and kestrels, which has led to research on both species and ways to preserve the birds.

In 2019, Hawk Watch International went global tracking some of the most at-risk species from South Africa to Indonesia.

The Jewel Basin site was established by Dan Casey of the Flathead Audubon 16 years ago. Covill is a 2011 Columbia Falls graduate and a birder extraordinaire. He runs Glacier Birding Adventures, which takes people out on birding excursions in Montana and in Central America.

Covill runs the day-to-day bird surveys under a contract with the Flathead Audubon Society and support from the Forest Service. The Audubon Society decided to fund the contract position in order to get the best possible data. Covill typically is on the ridge from about 10 a.m. until dusk each day, counting birds, a pair of 10 power binoculars in hand and an iPad on his lap.

Bramante and Willison are members of the Flathead Audubon Board.

He uses a piece of software called Dunkadoo, which makes it easy to input the data on sightings and species. The iPad has cell phone service so a person on the ground can see what’s been observed in real time online on the Dunkadoo website.

The Jewel Basin Hawk Watch effort runs from late August until the first week of November, or whenever the snow flies in earnest and the road to the Camp Misery Trailhead gets too icy or snowy or the trail from becomes impassable.

Sometimes that happens by mid-October, Covill noted.

The Hawk Watch site in the Jewel isn’t the only one in the Flathead — there’s also one in Glacier National Park on the flank of Mount Brown that is manned by park biologists and trained volunteers.

Covill is often alone on this windy ridge in the Jewel, but today he’s joined by Bramante, Willison and several other folks who are interested in birding. The effort can often use an extra set of eyes and the best way to learn is to spend a few sessions on the ridge, Bramante notes, learning the various shapes and habits of the various raptor species of the American West.

They use a great horned owl decoy on a stick to catch the migrating raptors eyes. The species are natural enemies and while many raptors are so far away they ignore the owl, some, especially those that are flying at or below the 7,000-foot ridge —will buzz into to at least take a look.

Others will simply attack it. Bramante recalled a falcon a few days ago that buzzed right between him and another observer at eye level.

But most the of observations are at quite a distance and require binoculars to get the correct identification, as it’s often just a silhouette of the bird against the sky. Seeing color and feathers is often a bonus, especially if the skies are gray.

Some raptors migrate farther than others. Many hawks, like the sharp shinned, go to the southern U.S. in the winter, Sharpies, as they’re called for short, aren’t seen very often in the valley in the summer months. They’re typically a forest bird and they prey on other birds and small rodents. A typical sighting happens when thy dive-bomb a backyard bird feeder.

Other hawks, like red-tailed hawks, also migrate, but Bramante notes there are many variations of red-tails, and they often do not have the trademark red-tail.

That’s why it’s so important to be able to ID birds by shape, silhouette and flight pattern.

Not all raptors migrate, Covill explains. There’s resident bald eagles, for example, and migratory ones and sometimes the summer residents move south while birds from the north will reside here for the winter.

They don’t just count the raptors, either. They also note other species — like songbirds. On this day there’s a flock of bluebirds, some pine grosbeaks and Townsend’s Solitaire to name a few.

Even a lone butterfly courses over teh ridge.

“Josh, are you looking at this? An adult red-tail?” Bramante asks.

“I’m on him,” Covill replies.

The hawk courses overhead, briefly harassed by two resident ravens, their bodies tumbling in the sky.

And so the afternoon goes — science at work on a high ridge in one of the finest places on Earth.