It was Hawkfest on Easter Friday.This happens at Beamer Park on top of the escarpment at the point i;n the escarpment that juts out towards the lake. The hawk count has been done each year since 1975. Here is the site with North American summaries - Mexico, the U.S., Panama and Canada. There are over 300 sites that capture data. Grimsby is one of 20 sites that list the daily count. There are large numbers (1490) coming through New York sites, with 207 yesterday counted in Grimsby. Yesterday would be a good day - sunny and windy. So there will be bigger numbers coming through to Grimsby in the next few days and weeks, depending on the weather.
It was too bad that our festival day was a dull, rainy day. There were few hawks to be seen and counted. Other years, there is a stream of birds passing high and low overhead. It is quite exciting to hear it when there's a Bald Eagle sighted overhead - our highlight was this Bald Eagle up close.
Where do vultures sleep? It seems to be nearby to us. I see them in the morning when they start to fly up after the sun is rising. This picture shows me of them just beyond the greenhouse last week.
Their habit is to join together about an hour before sunset to sleep in tall trees - particularly dead, leafless ones.
A group of vultures is called a wake, committee, venue, kettle, or volt.
It seems to me they migrate south as I don't see this phenomenon in the winter. Perhaps I've been witnessing the gathering of turkey vultures as they get ready to fly south. They are considered partial migrants in that the northern species migrate, but southern populations generally don't. It may be that we meet up in Florida in February.
