Tomorrow morning, Alex and I will be flying to Duluth, Minnesota to attend the 2010 HMANA (Hawk Migration Association of North America) conference. We made a poster looking at the geographic differences between the Tuscarora Summit hawk watch ("the Pulpit) and Waggoner's Gap. While the two sites are only 40 miles away from eachother, Waggoner's Gap, on average, gets 5.4 times as many raptors as the Pulpit per season. We proposed two reasons for this, which are summed up in this map. It is likely a combination of both that explains where the large numbers of raptors that fly through Waggoner's Gap actually travel through. Although, the second is more likely, since South Mountain Ridge is a "jump" of about 12 miles. If the Tuscarora Summit hawk watch was about 10 more miles south on the Tuscarora Ridge, it is likely the numbers would be much higher and closer to that of what Waggoner's Gap sees each fall.
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