Date: 9/20/26 9:03 pm From: <reports...> Subject: [cobirds] Mount Zion Hawk Watch at Windy Saddle Park (20 Sep 2026) 82 Raptors
Mount Zion Hawk Watch at Windy Saddle Park
Golden, Greater Denver, Colorado, USA
To see hourly weather data and details of migrant raptors, look up this watch at hawkcount.org.
This is a new raptor migration site identified and designated in mid-September 2024. This is Colorado's 1st fall hawk watch site, and the second hawk watch in Colorado.
To get to the site which is along Lookout Mountain Rd. in Golden, enter either Windy Saddle Park or Mount Zion into Google Maps on your favorite navigation app, or enter the coordinates 39.7368,-105.2454. From the parking lot ascend the stone steps to the watch site.
EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO THE HAWK WATCH TO ENJOY THE SPECTACLE OF RAPTOR MIGRATION, EVEN IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT IDENTIFYING RAPTORS IN FLIGHT. We will help you to learn Raptor ID if you are interested.
See https://groups.google.com/g/cobirds/c/Oznn4uc6MBk
Observation start time: 08:00:00
Observation end time: 16:00:00
Total observation time: 8 hours
Official Counter: Ajit Antony
Observers: Liza Antony, Scott Severs
Visitors:
Scott Severs from Longmont, president of Boulder Audubon, joined us for the
entire day. He read our reports on COBirds, and is an experienced birder
and hawk watcher, having counted hawks 2-3 times a week in the 1990s for 4
years after the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory now the Bird Conservancy of
the Rockies stopped funding paid counters, and Jeff Birek organized
volunteers to count. Scott was excellent in finding numerous hawks
especially distant ones to the NW and west, identifying them rapidly, and
photographing them, so helping us ID sexes of kestrels for example.
Many hikers asked us many questions about the hawk watch, and one of them
stayed over an hour. We were able to show easily visible GE, BE, CH, NH, TV
to visitors who were duly impressed, as some of them were initially
difficult to see against the blue sky, and they felt elated when they were
able to see them.
Weather:
Slight haze around Denver caused by an inversion layer which cleared up,
light cloud cover, light winds from the NE while the winds aloft were from
the West.
Raptor Observations:
This is the highest single day total this season - 82 migrant raptors. We
also passed the 1,000 migrant raptor count for the season. We had an
excellent Cooper's Hawk day with 27, and 3 GE - 2 adults and a juvenile.
Checking Hawkcount.org for the Dinosaur Ridge Hawk Watch in spring which is
what we have to compare with in Colorado, before the last 5 years when
there have been paid professional counting 8 hours daily, going back to 11
years before that there have only been 3 years which have had seasonal
counts over 1,000, and the counts going back from 2021 for 5 years had
1101, 556, 808, 588, 692 respectively.
A subadult GE with no white wing or tail patches but with faint whitish
along the greater coverts ventrally gave us a big problem. We initially
found soaring to the East at 2:25 p.m. where joined an adult GE and both
flew to the South looking like migrants, but they individually went to the
NE at 2:25 p.m., the subadult circling around for a long time, then glided
strongly to the SW close to the horizon and we counted it, and a few
minutes later a visitor named Rob, the one who stayed over an hour, told us
that it had perched on a tree next to the westernmost antenna on Lookout
Mountain. This was a few minutes after we had counted it, and we thought
perhaps he saw a TV land, but looking through a scope we could easily see
it was a GE, this being 2:55 p.m. We decided to watch it in case it was a
migrant. An RT dove on it 6 times with dropped talons, and the GE finally
flew far to the NE at 3:11 p.m., non-migrant.
Non-migrant raptors: GE 2, RT 3, TV 3, BE 2.
Non-raptor Observations:
8 paragliders after 11:00 a.m. MDT with excellent lift flying extremely
high and going far north and south.
Predictions:
Sunny, with a high near 73. Calm wind becoming east 5 to 7 mph in the
afternoon.
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Report submitted by Ajit Antony (<aiantony...>)
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