Our day trip to Hawk Mountain: Turkey Vultures, Turkey Vultures, and more Turkey Vultures

Yesterday, @cmp2020 and I took an afternoon trip to the "Hawk Mountain Sanctuary for global raptor conservation". Since it's the spring migration season, we wanted to see what sort of bird activity was going on there, and we wanted to get a sense of the place in preparation for the fall migration season (which, supposedly, is busier).

Make sure you read to the end for a surprising historical twist.

Spoiler alert: The bird spotters reported a total of 8 migrating birds yesterday. That's not to say that there were no birds to be seen, but just that the ~50 birds we saw were probably all local residents. All of those that we were able to identify turned out to be Turkey Vultures. There may have been other species, but if so, we missed photos and couldn't ID them for sure. In this post, I'll provide a short trip description.

I got on the road at about 12:30 PM in order to pick @cmp2020 up in/near Lancaster County at 2pm after an event ended. The trip took us through the heart of Pennsylvania's Amish country. We have been told that this is actually a popular tourist spot for people from Germany with an interest in history, because the Amish still maintain the traditional German lifestyle from the 18^th century ("Dutch" in Pennsylvania Dutch comes from "Deutsch" for German. This population largely immigrated from Southwestern Germany, Alsace, and Switzerland). I was driving, so no pictures, though.

After meeting up with @cmp2020, we headed on to Hawk Mountain, arriving at about 3:30 pm. The AIs had told me that the trail access would be free, so I was surprised by the $10 per person trail fees that we had to pay, but of course it makes sense that fees would be charged. Once there, we walked a short distance down "Lookout Trail" to the "South Lookout" and hung around for a while admiring the view and watching for birds.

Here are some views from the South Lookout and another nearby overlook.

From there, it didn't take long until we saw our first Turkey Vultures.

We also wanted to get to the North Lookout, though, so we started moving down Lookout Trail. According to timestamps on the pictures, the walk from South Lookout to North Lookout took no longer than 30 minutes, and we arrived there at about 4:25. It seemed like most of the walk was uphill, including some fairly steep "staircases" that were cut out of the rocks and soil. My fitbit says that my heartrate peaked at 147 beats per minute during the walk, so let's just say that it takes a bit of effort for those of us who are not as young and fit as we used to be.

We stayed at the North Lookout for about 30 minutes and we saw many Turkey Vultures and a few birds that might have been something else, but I didn't get very many decent pictures there and we couldn't definitively ID the birds we weren't sure about.

I only got a couple landscape shots at this site (for the record, unlike @cmp2020, I wasn't going to step anywhere near the edge of those rocks.;-)

And here are a few bird photos from the North Lookout that came out OK.

On a side note, the photo below isn't great, and I thought it was a Bald Eagle's white head when looking at the photo on my camera screen. As a result, some other people who overheard our conversation now believe that they saw a Bald Eagle at Hawk Mountain yesterday. Unfortunately, when we could see it on a bigger screen it was just another Turkey Vulture. Oops.

We also saw a kettle of maybe 7-8 Turkey Vultures.

Here are 2 at about 41X zoom	And here are 5 at about 20X

After about ¹/₂ hour at the North Lookout, we headed back to the South Lookout. This trip was downhill, so much less taxing. Along the way, we saw this North American Millipede. Maybe it was about 3-4 inches in length (~8-10 cm).

About ¹/₂ hour after leaving the North lookout, we were back at the South lookout again, and we got photos of a couple more... you guessed it - Turkey Vultures.

Finally, on the way out, I took photos of some signs that we had ignored on the way in (Is that backwards?).

We also did not go on the River of Rocks trail.

In all, it was a fun afternoon, and we met our main objective, which was to learn the lay of the land in order to return during the fall migration season. We were homeward bound by about 6pm. It was a little bit disappointing that the only birds we could ID were Turkey Vultures, but that's the luck of the draw. To top it all off, we also saw many Turkey Vultures during the drive home, including many in flight and two up close on the side of the road with a deer carcass as we were driving past.

One final twist: At dinner, @lisa.palmer wondered if any murderers had ever hidden bodies in the woods at Hawk Mountain, and @cmp2020 looked it up on the Internet. It turns out that some people consider Matthias Schaumboch to be America's unofficial first serial killer, and he operated an Inn at the top of Hawk Mountain between 1850 and 1865. Apparently, he made a death-bed confession to the killings of 11-15 people.

Thank you for your attention!

---

View this post on SteemAtlas.

All photos above were taken by me with a Nikon P1000 camera. I'm sharing them under the CC BY 4.0 license (share & adapt freely with attribution to the original source).

10% beneficiary to @steem-atlas