On page 36 of Northern Woodlands magazine’s Spring 2024 issue, there’s an article by Brett Amy Thelen, Science Director at the Harris Center for Conservation Education, describing work by biologists at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania to track the movements of broad-winged hawks. As Thelen notes in her article, the Hawk Mountain biologists have affixed transmitters to a total of 37 hawks, and “31 of those transmitters have yielded at least one season of data, shedding light on migration patterns, premigration movements, home ranges, habitat needs, and more.” Partner organizations including the Harris Center and the Vermont Institute of Natural Science help to locate and monitor nest sites in New England, in preparation for tagging expeditions.
Thelen provided the editors with two images of broad-winged hawk winter habitat in Columbia, that didn’t fit in the limited space of the print magazine. These images offer fascinating glimpses of the southern landscapes that are home to our “northern” hawks for part of each year.
As Thelen noted, transmitter data revealed that “Harris,” the first broad-winged hawk to be tagged in New Hampshire and one of only a few males in the Hawk Mountain study, spent two winters in the same rural area of north-central Colombia. In January 2023, collaborators in Colombia traveled to Harris’s overwintering habitat in the tropical dry forest of the Cauca River Canyon (left photo) and lower montane humid forest (right photo), where they collected additional geospatial data.