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Bill Thompson, III writes The Well-equipped Birder, a regular feature of Bird Watcher's Digest.

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Visiting a Hawk Watch

My first visit to a hawk watch came more than 20 years ago. I rose several hours before dawn on a fall day and made the long drive from my home in Baltimore, Maryland, to Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, the most famous hawk watch in the world. I was spurred by stories I had heard of days when hawks blackened the skies and from reading about the mountain in numerous magazines. Although I had been bird watching for a number of years and had gone on more than a few field trips, I found I had entered a different realm. I was alternately lost, confused, frustrated, and amazed. The result is that I have spent hundreds of fall days at hawk watches since that first trip, and every one of them has been a pleasure.

If you have never been to an established hawk watch, you should go at the first opportunity. You may not get bitten by the hawk-watching bug, but you will enjoy yourself and you will remember the day as long as you carry a field guide and binoculars. It is another world, however, and there are preparations to make and guidelines to follow.

First, hawk watching is a subculture of bird watching, with its own rules. Hawk watchers are their own breed, fascinated by birds of prey. Some of them hardly notice other birds, or if they do, they refer to them as hawk food. If that view seems narrow to you, remember that you are a visitor to their domain. Be polite. This is a day about hawks.

Second, when you make your first visit to a hawk watch, do not expect to find and identify hawks-that will come with experience, which in hawk watching is everything. You will be shown hawks and you will be told what they are.

Field guides are not much help at a lookout. It is one thing to watch a sparrow at the feeder and decide whether it has a breast spot. It is another to look at a speck several miles away against a pale blue sky.

Field guides tend to show birds up close. Hawks at hawk watches are often beyond the limit of visibility. Experienced watchers rarely see, or look for, the red tail on a red-tailed hawk, the white rump on a northern harrier, or the red shoulders on a red-shouldered hawk. Hawk watchers use other clues.

Some field guides try to help by describing shapes and flight patterns. But concluding that the wing of one hawk is proportionately thinner than the wing of another hawk is not something that any watcher can do on the first, or even the second or third or fifth day. An understanding of the subtle characters that hawk watchers use develops over time and requires seeing hundreds of hawks. The good news is that on flight days, hundreds of birds will pass the hawk watch.

This is how your first visit will probably go: You will be standing or sitting a little distance from experienced counters, searching the sky and not seeing much. The counters will be glancing around, appearing to be just passing the time while they talk about hawks, what happened the day before, and the party last night. Then one of them will casually say, "Sharpie at 11 o'clock." The others will glance over and may even raise their binoculars for a few seconds before nodding agreement.

You, on the other hand, are frantically scanning the sky, and when someone else who cannot find it asks where it is and you hear that it is just over the tall pine tree on the right, you will again scan with your binoculars. Still no hawk. Wait two or three minutes. Keep scanning. Eventually a black speck will appear. After checking to make sure it is not part of your lunch clinging to the lens of your binoculars you concede that it is probably a bird. Several minutes later the bird will be close enough that even you will know it is a hawk. If you are patient enough, and a little lucky, it will come closer, and you will see that it appears to have the long tail and short wings of an accipiter. If you are even luckier, it will glide right over your head, leaving you a wonderful view of the squared tail and small head. A sharpie.

At this point, irritation is replaced by frustration and awe. Why can't you see these things, and how could any mortal identify what is no more than a dark speck, a mirage? You will never be able to do this, and you decide to leave and pursue birds you can both find and identify.

Hang in there. What you are seeing is not magic, and it is not unattainable. It just takes time, and if you want to, you can learn to do the same thing. On your first day just sit back and enjoy.

Learning to spot hawks takes less experience than identifying them. Part of the trick is learning the flight lines of the hawk watch you are visiting. Depending on where the winds are that day, the hawks will tend to follow certain routes, to appear at predictable places in the sky. The local watchers know these lines and take advantage of that knowledge to spot the birds while they are still a long way out. Watch where the birds are first appearing, and pretty soon you will have a rough understanding of the line being used that day.

Look at the clouds. Hawk watchers know that it is far, far easier to spot a hawk when it is against a big fluffy cloud than it is to pick it out of an unbroken sea of blue. Learn to keep your eyes still for a few seconds. Trying to see something that small is a lot harder if your eyes are moving. Pick a spot and stare at it. If there is a hawk out there, it will suddenly appear.

Spotting is one thing. Identifying is a whole different game. The clues here are shape, size, proportion, and flight style. If these seem hopelessly subjective and uncertain, it is because you are not used to them. For experienced hawk watchers they are as diagnostic as a red tail or a white rump.

The first time you see a red-tailed hawk a few hundred feet overhead, and can see the tail and the belly band, you identify it with confidence. After you have seen a few hundred or a thousand, you realize you are making the same identification when the bird is a few thousand feet away. Another few thousand birds, and without even thinking about it, you are identifying them so far away that you cannot see the red tail, the belly band, or much of anything else.

The trick is to learn from veteran watchers. If you want to know, ask. Wait a reasonable time and then sidle over and introduce yourself. Ask how they could tell that the bird was a sharpie. Listen to the answer and look at the bird. What they say won't make much sense at first, but now you know what to look for. Every time someone points out a sharpie, check it out. Slowly and surely the instructions will sink in. Be patient. This is knowledge acquired by degree. Let the impressions seep into your consciousness. Try it out on another hawk, then another.

There are a few useful clues to hawk-watch behavior. Almost all the hawk watchers I have met love sharing what they know. Often the vigil they keep is a lonely one, and they look forward to the company and are eager to recruit another participant. Don't think that because you are a beginner you will be treated disdainfully. This year's beginner is the valued friend who staffs the watch two days a week next year.

There are moments at hawk watch lookouts when birds seem to be coming in waves. When this happens, the counters are busy trying to make sure they do not miss anything and are getting accurate counts. This is a bad time to start asking questions. Hawk watchers are focused on one thing-getting a count of all the birds that go past. No matter how busy the day, there will be slow moments and plenty of time to talk and learn.

Pick your spot, get an early start, take lots of snacks and drinks, extra clothes, a hat with a long visor, and plan to see more hawks in a day than you have seen in a lifetime (unless it is a bad day, of course, which is just an excuse to come back). There is no way of knowing if you are going to become addicted except to try it, but beware. If you visit a hawk watch one time "just to see what it is like," you may find yourself a couple of years later rearranging schedules and lives, planning whole falls around those crisp, cool days when sharpies and redtails are pouring by. It could be that a beginner, a first-time visitor, will stand deferentially by your shoulder and ask how in blazes you knew that was a hawk.