POWNAL — Five days into the fifth annual hawk watch at Bradbury Mountain State Park, naturalist Andy Northrup held binoculars to his eyes looking for hawks, falcons, vultures and eagles migrating to Maine.

Gazing southward on Saturday morning during a stubborn snowstorm, he stood on an island of rock overlooking a sea of trees as far as the eye could see from the 485-foot open summit of Bradbury Mountain.

Northrup is the watch’s official counter. He said he was hired by Freeport Wild Bird Supply owners Jeannette and Derek Lovitch, who organized the annual two-month watch. It started Tuesday and will continue seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. through May 15.

Last spring, watch staff observed a record 4,474 hawks, including 52 bald eagles, 500 ospreys and 1,746 broad-winged hawks.

As of Saturday morning, 40 red-tailed hawks, 23 red-shouldered hawks, 22 turkey vultures, four Cooper’s hawks, three bald eagles, two unidentified raptors and one sharp-shinned hawk had been spotted since Tuesday, according to Northrup’s official tally board.

The goal of the Bradbury Mountain Raptor Research Project‘s Spring Hawk Watch is to identify, count and document all raptors that pass the mountain to determine long-term trends in populations, he said.

It is sponsored by the Lovitches birding store and Nikon.

“The big part of it also is education and outreach, trying to get people interested in nature in general and birding and hawk migration,” Northrup said. “This is a pretty popular spot.”

Last year’s hawk watch attracted more than 1,100 visitors, Jeannette Lovitch said Thursday in a Maine Department of Conservation report.

Heavy weather and strong winds Saturday kept migrating birds hunkered down, but Northrup stood fast, hoping to spot an incoming hawk bucking logic.

“Normally, I wouldn’t be up here, but as we know, it’s going to clear up,” he said. “So I’m just hanging out, kind of waiting for the visibility to improve a bit.”

The bulk of migrating raptors arrive mid-April through early May, he said.

“In March, we see mostly red-tailed hawks and red-shouldered hawks, and then come April, we have more broad-wings, sharp-shinned hawk, osprey, you know, kind of the later migrants,” Northrup said.

With a north wind blowing at 10:25 a.m., no raptors were flying nearby, just a few songbirds and crows below the summit.

Geography plays a big role in where birds migrate, which is why Bradbury Mountain is a sweet spot.

“The coastal plain is a nice migration site, and this bump here, one, it’s a good vantage point for us, and it’s also a source of updrafts, which the birds will kind of ride to gain altitude,” Northrup said.

They can then glide for a long while without expending much energy.

Separating migrants from resident raptors can be difficult, Northrup said.

“A lot of migrants we’ll see really far out, and we’ll be trying to identify these little specks, and you have to use their flight style and their shape and silhouette,” he said.

If he’s lucky, they’ll fly right overhead.

“But a lot of times, we’ll pick one up like over Yarmouth, and if it’s steadily going over this way, we’ll know it’s a migrant,” he said.

“They don’t have to be going straight north, as long as they’re clearly trying to gain altitude and clearly trying to move somewhere.”

Resident raptors such as bald eagles and turkey vultures will pop up out of the woods and hang out or maybe fly toward Brunswick and double back, Northrup said.

“So we have to watch for that and make sure we don’t count residents,” he said. “If they’re flying circles and riding thermals and going anywhere in a north direction, then we’ll count them as migrants.”

Northrup scans the sky 360 degrees using binoculars until he spots what resembles a raptor. Then he switches to a more powerful tripod-mounted Nikon field scope for identification.

At 11:09 a.m., the storm was starting to break up overhead as sunlight lit up the ocean about 8 miles away in Freeport. Northrup brought the binoculars hanging from his neck to his eyes.

At 11:45 a.m., he suddenly grew excited.

“There’s two birds over the Brunswick tower, and one of them is dive-bombing the other!” he said.

He quickly switched to the field scope.

“It’s a buteo getting dive-bombed by an accipiter!” Northrup said, identifying the birds by genus.

The buteo he soon identified as a red-tailed hawk, but he couldn’t determine the accipiter, a genus that includes goshawks and sparrowhawks, according to Wikipedia.

“I got two birds in that hour, at least,” he said. “It’s a good sign. I’m not getting skunked today.”

tkarkos@sunjournal.com