We must begin with a heavy dose of “CAUTION!”, “WARNING!” and “DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!” for this week’s fieldcraft tip. Indeed, take the warning seriously, lest you damage your eyes.
Anyone who’s done much hawk watching knows that sometimes the birds get so high that you can’t see them, certainly not with the naked eye, and often not with binoculars, either. This happens most often when the sky is perfectly clear blue and rising air currents create lots of lift.
There are different ways to deal with the “high sky” situation, one of which is simply to go look at something other than hawks. But if you are determined to find high flying raptors, here’s a method that works, and one I used most recently during the Great Texas Birding Classic at Anzalduas County Park (just across the Rio Grande from Mexico).
We needed a few birds for the classic including, Broad-winged Hawk and Mississippi Kite. These two birds are master high soarers, and the conditions were ideal for that—light winds with the powerful Rio Grande Valley sunshine beating on the earth, heating it and creating thermals that we could actually see as floating dust and lint rose rapidly in the air.
I tried scanning the sky in a conventional way and finally came up with a few kites but, it was tough to find them and tough to get my teammates on them. So, I tried a different tactic. Wearing high quality polarized sunglasses; I extended my hand to cover the sun itself and then checked the bright halo around it for birds. This bright halo area even backlights light-bellied raptors, making them stand out markedly from the surrounding sky. And indeed, after a few minutes of watching, a few dozen Broad-wingeds and several hundred more Mississippi Kites appeared, relatively easy to detect. Bringing my binoculars to bear (and very carefully avoiding pointing them right at the sun) I checked the birds for something different, and sure enough gleaned the long-winged silhouette of a high-flying Peregrine Falcon for our list.
Use extreme caution and wear good sunglasses if give this tip a try. You will find raptors that no one else can.