Caesar's Head Hawk Watch

I spent today's MMO time up at Caesar's Head to see some hawks! This time of year, citizen scientists volunteer to count migrating hawks, and one of the sites isn't too far for me!

This is the view from Caesar's Head: Table Rock & Table Rock lake.

After adjusting the image on my computer and going back and forth between my Peterson's Field Guide and my MerlinID app, I'm fairly confident to say this is a broad winged hawk. We saw 35 of those this morning in just one hour. Bill, the official counter, has a good chance of seeing hundreds this afternoon.

This one, I think is a red tailed hawk. I don't know for sure. I mean, we saw a lot of those, but it doesn't look like it to me. But I can't identify it. I've posted to the Greenville County Bird Club, so hopefully someone can help me out! EDIT: Apparently it's an immature broad winged hawk! Thank you fellow bird nerds!

This one I know for sure! It's a turkey vulture. Love those guys! 

In all honesty, the hawk watch wasn't quite what I thought it would be. I heard that hundreds of raptors pass by Caesar's Head daily during the fall migration. I missed the larger kettles and my biggest group was around ten broad winged hawks. I thought they would be closer, but without binoculars, they were like specks of pepper in the sky! The few photos I got were the rare birds that flew closer.

Bill, the official Hawk Watch counter, was very kind and shared a lot of information with me. It was fun to spend a couple hours up there watching for hawks and getting to nerd our with a fellow birder. I don't spend much time with other people who are, like, really into birds. So that was a nice treat!