Hawk Mountain is exactly what its title describes, a large mountain with hawks and other raptors.  Though the long car ride wouldn’t be classified as “fun” in my opinion, the sites I saw when I got to Hawk Mountain were quite magnificent.  It was a warm fall day when we went there.  We were excited to be there and couldn’t wait to hike the mountain.  On our way in we didn't see many birds because it was near the end of their migration and the wind was coming from a direction that slowed migration down.       We took a minute to clown around with Hawk Mountain's giant statue. [Picture to the right.]

     The first place we went to get some information was at the information center, which included a gift shop filled with books, stuffed animals and lots of knick-knacks.  We loved looking at things like that.  When we walked down a short flight of stairs and looked up, we saw many modeled birds “flying” above.  On one of the walls, there was a huge demonstration with lights that showed different migration paths of whatever raptor you chose.  For example, if you chose the Red-tailed Hawk, you would click on the Red-tailed Hawk button and its migratory route would light up on the large map.
     Then we had to get to our next activity.  We went hiking on one of Hawk Mountain’s trails to a look out on a long ledge.  The sight in front of us was beautiful.  The leaves were red and orange and a beautiful river ran through the valley. However, we didn’t see any raptors right away.  We talked to the volunteers that worked there about birds they saw that day and surprisingly, they did see many interesting raptors earlier that day. We couldn't wait until we saw some, too!

The next demonstration was about binoculars.  The volunteer showed how to use binoculars, adjust them, and and see objects with them.  It was actually kind of interesting.  We focused our binoculars on the sign to the left.      We had to walk all the way down the mountain, across the road, and into another section of the woods to get to the next demonstration. Everyone sat on benches and soon it was standing room only!  We were surprised to see that so many other people were interested in raptors, too!

     Our presenter talked about what raptors are and the history of Hawk Mountain. Hawk Mountain used to be a place where hunters would come and actually kill the raptors and other birds that flew by.  Luckily, before it was too late, Mrs. Edge and Maurice Broun turned it into a safe place for raptors.  It has a sad story with a happy ending. 
    We saw a Red-tailed Hawk and a Great Horned Owl.  We knew that the “horns” were just how the Great Horned Owl looked when he was scared or angry and stuck up his feathers.  But we didn’t know that this owl could actually squeeze 4,000 pounds of pressure per square inch when a strong man can squeeze only 400 pounds per square inch!  On top of that, we found that the owl could not move his eyes in his sockets.  He needs to turn his head just to see things that we could see by turning our eyeballs. A comparison was made between the size of the owl's eyes to his body size. If you made the same comparison with a human body size, our eyes would be as big as grapefruits!

One of the most important things about Hawk Mountain isn't how pretty it is or how much we learned by the demonstrations.  The most important thing is that they do bird counting there.  You might think that bird counting isn't important, but it is.  Bird counts are used to keep track of how many birds are in migration or nesting. Sometimes the numbers that they get show them that there are problems for some birds.       An example of this is in our interview with Mr. John Sauer, a Research Wildlife Biologist for the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center.  He said that experts can tell if there are less broad-winged hawks (just for example) because less are migrating.