This video shows HawkWatch International’s lead raptor bander, Amanda Hancock, releasing a first year Sharp-shinned hawk up at Chelan Ridge. Captured birds are measured, banded and released.

This was during an NCW Audubon field trip on September 25, 2022, when we visited this particular HawkWatch site. Our group saw several raptors from the observation deck that day and 5 different species, one of which was a very dark-morphed Merlin that flew directly above us before soaring down the ridge to the South.

Crew leader Gary Palmer noted that this has been a good year for sighting raptors up at the Ridge as the total counts are running slightly higher than usual. Counts per season typically range between 2,000-3,000 migrants and up to 17 species.

HawkWatch International, in partnership with the USFS Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, began annual standardized counts at the site in 1998 to monitor and learn more about raptors migrating through the east Cascades of Washington within the Pacific Coast Flyway.

The Chelan Ridge HawkWatch station will stay open barring bad weather until October 27^th and they welcome visitors. At: Hawkwatch International – Home you can get directions to the site and learn much more about the organization.

eBird (www.ebird.org), a global bird sighting database holds over 1 BILLION bird sightings around the globe. The NCWAS four-county area has contributed over 1.3 million bird sightings to the global total.

A new report by Bruce McCammon looks at the NCWAS eBird data between 2015 and June 2022 to describe the “Who?”, “When?”, “How Many”?, and “Where” aspects of the 306 bird species that have been reported to eBird from the NCWAS area. You can view or download the report here.

Graphs, charts, and text take a taxonomic approach to describe the North Central Washington bird species. The report concentrates on taxonomic Order, Family, and Species levels.

The report is provided in PDF format to allow you to download for use on your local device or, should you wish, print it. If you decide to print, the paper is set up to print as an 8.5×11 inch booklet using 11×17″ paper. The report uses color in many of the charts and graphs. Color printing can be expensive but the report should print reasonably well in black-and-white to reduce costs.

When you view the report in the free Acrobat Reader, please make sure that you set Reader to show a two-page display with “show cover page” selected as shown below.

A set of preliminary observations is provided at the end of the paper. If you discover patterns or have interesting observations of your own, please let us know by sending an email to ncwaudubon@gmailcom. You can send any questions about the report to NCW Audubon as well.