A kettle of broad-winged hawks in September. Photo courtesy Putney Mountain HawkwatchKate Kampner is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.Theresa Armata remembers the scene atop Putney Mountain the first time she came to join her local hawk-watching crew in 2010.  “There were these people sitting in chairs staring at the sky,” she said, reflecting on their welcoming presence. “And so on my next day off, I came again, and again, and again.” She’s been an official counter for the Putney Mountain Hawkwatch ever since, one of several making sure the tallies of raptor sightings are accurate. Their work, the group says, shows 2024 has been a banner year.The group, which heads out from late August to mid-November, reported a total of 19,428 raptors — about 16,200 counts being broad-winged hawks, a common North American species. In a typical year volunteers would see about 7,000 total raptors. This was the group’s “best year ever,” said John Anderson, a volunteer since 1996.Every day members of the group sit on its namesake summit and count the many species that fly by the peak. At the end of each day they report their numbers, which are recorded on hawkcount.org, a database used by the Hawk Migration Association of North America. What accounted for the jump in sightings this year?“It’s a weather thing,” Anderson said. “It’s just the big weather patterns we don’t quite fully understand. Little variations can make a huge difference.”When broad-winged hawks migrate, they tend to gather in thermals — bubbles of warm, rising air that help carry them on their flight. The birds look for other hawks to know where a thermal might be — a lot of them is a good sign, causing a mass of birds to gravitate. Anderson said the Putney Mountain group once saw some 800 broad-wings in what likely was a thermal. “At a distance they look like swarms of gnats,” he said. “The sky is full of specks.” The volunteers use a variety of binoculars and spotting scopes, the same methods they’ve been using since the group formed in 1974. The group had right around 40 volunteers this year, Anderson said, ranging from people who had two visits or fewer to those who came out most days of the week. “You can find a million interested people, but it takes a lot of patience and a lot of time commitment,” he said. Candace Hess has had a lifelong love for birdwatching and joined the Hawkwatch in 2013. “It’s just really rewarding to see so many birds and to see what happens in the different years that have high numbers and the comparisons,” she said. Hess is interested not only in what is happening on the Putney summit but  also in the bigger picture of the birds — their overall health, how the populations are fluctuating and the conversations happening about their overall decline. “What happened to us this season just falls in that whole mix for me,” she said. She listed 2017, 2018 and 2021 as other outstanding years, but no other year has matched the prevailing number of 2024. Armata said that “we never really know” when it comes to the why factor. She said the weather systems she saw at the beginning of the season looked promising. “I kind of had a feeling that we might have a pretty good year,” she said, when she saw a big pressure system start to settle repeatedly with no northwest winds. “But (I) never expected what actually happened in September with our broad-wing hawk count.” Along with Hess and Anderson, Armata is one of the few group members who is an official counter, the people who make the entries into the database and make the final decisions when there’s a dispute over numbers or species identification. Armata lives in Bennington and drives an hour and a half to the summit on the days she counts from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and even beyond. “It’s just an awesome sight of nature,” she said, “especially in September to see the huge mass of birds just coming over you.” Soon, Armata will be awarded the Community Scientist Lifetime Achievement Award from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies for her work as a volunteer. “You meet so many interesting people,” Armata said. “It’s a wonderful way to spend the day.” When Kent McFarland, co-founder of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, wants to get a more complete sense of how the hawks are faring, he turns to the North American Breeding Bird Survey, a long-term monitoring database that tracks North America bird populations during June. The database provides numbers the Hawkwatch doesn’t get during its off-season. The overall trends of the database suggest that broad-wing hawks are increasing in the region, McFarland said. The data also shows an increased sightings of other species such as the black vulture and turkey vultures. “Clearly the reason they had a record count was that wild broad-winged count right there,” McFarland said. “I think this starts to tell the story a little bit.”Read the story on VTDigger here: Putney Mountain Hawkwatch reports ‘best year ever’ for sightings.