Raptors like this red-tail hawk and other migrating birds either hunker down during hurricanes or find alternate routes. The raptor count in Corpus Christi this fall will determine how Hurricane Harvey did or didn’t affect migration in the Coastal Bend. Courtesy photo
Celebrating raptor migration, the Celebration of Flight is set for Sept. 22-24 at Hazel Bazemore Park in the Calallen area.
The free festival aids in the counting of hawks, falcons, eagles and other raptors as they make their trek south.
“The Corpus Christi HawkWatch is the largest in the nation — we average 700,000 birds coming through the city per year,” said Joel Simon, the local event coordinator. Figures are submitted to HawkWatch International, which records species identities into sex, age and color. It also tracks numbers and behaviors of migrating raptors.
Raptor migration runs from Aug. 1-Nov. 15 with its peak from Sept. 23-30. The annual festival is always held during that peak time, when counters and visitors can see 100,000-400,000 raptors in a single day.
Along with bird-watching and counting, the Celebration of Flight stages raptor shows, educational presentations and family-friendly activities.
“We teach people about raptors — birds of prey, hawks, owls, vultures, falcons,” Gaines said.
People are naturally curious, interested or impressed with raptors, he said.
“We put on free-flight presentations — the action takes place above the audience,” Gaines said. “We fly them above the audience, in front of the audience and up and down the aisles, exhibiting a lot of the birds’ natural behavior: owls with their silent flight, falcons with their agility.”
With 90 percent of North America’s migrating birds flying through the Coastal Bend, birding has become a huge tourist draw. The area is the end of a funnel for birds heading to destinations in Mexico and Central and South America, explained Kevin Gaines, director of Wildlife Reveal, the nonprofit behind the raptor shows at the Celebration of Flight festival. The birds don’t like to fly over large bodies of water, so they follow the coastline into Mexico.
“Once the birds migrating south hit the Gulf of Mexico, they travel along the coastline and stop in Corpus Christi before continuing their flight along the Gulf coast,” Gaines explained.
For more information on this 19th annual event, visit hawkwatch.org.
