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Hawk Counting at Canopy Tower Day 1

Writer's picture: Cameron CoxCameron Cox

After a five-year covid-relate hiatus the Semiphore Hill/Canopy Tower count is back! (Follow our count daily at https://hawkcount.org/day_summary.php?rsite=627&ryear=2024&rmonth=10&rday=13) I was the last counter to count here, back in the pre-covid before times in 2019, and it is my honor to revive the count. I have not done a bird counting job since I has here last, and considered myself semi/mostly retired from the bird bum life, but there were a very few counts that could tempted me out of my near-competent state of adulting and back temporarily into the life of bird-counter-for-hire, but this was one that could. When Carlos Bethancourt, the face, the brains, and the brawn of the Canopy Family of Lodges in Panama, asked me for recommendations for a 2024 hawk counter I knew just the guy!

 My first day back counting at Canopy Tower started off hot in more ways than one from the start. Yes, I was sweltering, sweating like it was my only talent, but the raptors where hot almost from the first moment. There was no "Hello old friend, I know it has been a while since you did this bird counting thing, let's break you in easy". No, it was 48 birds in the first half hour (ok, easy), then 1810 in the first full hour (hmm, this is not quite like riding a bicycle but I’m fine), then 8508 between 10-11 (HO BOY, IS IT TIME TO PANIC?). Birds were streaming out of kettles at two different points, which, along with spiraling up into the clouds and disappearing, and spotting a line of birds that is already well past me, are a few of my least favorite things. The 11-12 hour featured fewer birds, 3030, but continued my abrupt jolt back into hawk counting as birds drifted farther and farther away until the bits of pepper thrown across the sky were ground so fine they were more a whisper than a spice.

Like true friends long separated though, old rhythms come back quickly, bird counting is a friend I know well. One that for long and influential stretches of my life has been what defined it. Old rhythms punctuated with what, for me, are still exotic sights and sounds. Streams of Broad-winged Hawk, a bird I am intimately familiar with, detouring around hulking King Vultures, the odd croaking of Keel-billed Toucan puncturing my concentration as I clicked distant streams of migrating hawks, a sloth staring at me as I entered data. It is this mix of familiar and the new and exciting that makes observing migration in Panama magical. It's good to be counting. It's good to be back.




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