![]() Their breeding range lay well to the north. Growing up in eastern Pennsylvania in the 1970s, I knew goshawks as only a rare autumn and winter migrant, and that had been the case in the central Appalachian Mountains for at least a century before. “Our Most Savage Destroyer of Small Game” Northern Goshawk (in hand, banded under proper permitting by Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory) by Alex Lamoreaux/Macaulay Library. During fall migration they are a favorite raptor for birders to see at hawkwatch sites in the U.S. The Northern Goshawk is the bigger, fiercer, wilder relative of the Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s Hawks that prowl suburbs and backyards-a secretive alpha accipiter that lives in mature and old-growth forests. But other goshawk specialists caution that there may be cycles within cycles within cycles, and they are cautiously optimistic that the glory days of huge goshawk flights will return. Some scientists look at dwindling goshawk migration counts and see the signature of climate change and habitat alteration. Yet many hawkwatchers fear such floods have faded away last autumn, Hawk Ridge didn’t even break 100 goshawks. These irruptions peaked in the 1970s and 80s, when close to 6,000 goshawks might pass a count site like Hawk Ridge in Duluth, Minnesota, in a single autumn. Goshawks are also famous for their sometimes cyclical invasion flights, especially in the western Great Lakes. ![]() But now it seems some of those gains may have been rolled back by an exotic disease and, perhaps, another equally fierce predator. Once eliminated from parts of the East and Upper Midwest, goshawks underwent a renaissance of sorts in the late 20th century, reoccupying landscapes from which they’d been absent for generations. They have been the focus of intensive research and sometimes acrimonious litigation over their proper management, with big implications for forestry and timbering in places like the Pacific Northwest and Southwestern mountains. ![]() Over the past two centuries goshawks rode a rollercoaster of persecution and conservation across many parts of their global range, experiencing drastically changing fortunes, range contractions, and range expansions. In the words of one banding colleague: “Every gos is a story.”Īnd theirs has been an interesting one. They are flashy and powerful, fearless, and memorable. ![]() In the late 1980s and 90s, I began trapping and banding migrant raptors along that ridge, first with the sanctuary’s research team and later for my own migration research goshawks were the occasional and always exciting cherry on a great day. An avid teenaged hawkwatcher, I saw my first “gos” on a blustery October afternoon in 1976 at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania. My connections with goshawks go back a long way. In the weeks that followed this most recent encounter, I spent hours slipping quietly through those woods looking for any local goshawks. But I see them often enough that I’m confident they nest in the large expanse of beech-hemlock forest that lies out my back door. Here in southern New Hampshire, the Northern Goshawk-the biggest and heaviest of the world’s 50-some accipiter species, a circumboreal raptor renowned for its predatory flair and tenacity-is at best an uncommon breeder. The goshawk passed within just eight or 10 feet of me, never giving me a glance from its blood-red eyes, then disappeared back into the woods. A huge blue-gray raptor, its black head set off by ivory-white eyebrows, swept up the middle of the driveway at head height, pursued by the sounds of avian indignation. From down our long, wooded lane, I heard screaming jays and a host of alarm calls that grew louder and closer. Overnight, a flood of songbirds had surged across New England, and I was in a happy daze standing in the front yard, trying to keep up with waves of warblers, vireos, tanagers, grosbeaks, and thrushes passing through the trees around me. It was one of those migration season mornings when you’re not sure where to look next. From the Autumn 2022 issue of Living Bird magazine.
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