For an hour this morning, I positioned myself on the sled hill next to the confluence of Little Darby & Big Darby Creeks, just east of the village of Georgesville.  I was curious as to the potential for the wooded corridor along these streams to support any significant raptor migration.  I have tried this before - most recently in mid-September - with mixed results, and today was fairly similar.  Between 10:30 - 11:30, I tallied 26 raptors:

14 Turkey Vultures
3 Black Vultures
1 Sharp-shinned Hawk
2 Cooper's Hawks
4 Red-tailed Hawks
1 unidentified buteo
1 N.Harrier

2 of the Red-tails were likely residents, but the others all seemed to be migrants, moving south with different degrees of alacrity.  If I had put in a full morning here, I could likely have pushed the totals up to 50 - 60 birds, which is not bad for a site in central Ohio with limited elevation change.  Most of my other counts have produced similar, but slightly lower figures.

This brings up the point that perhaps we're missing out on some significant raptor migration here in central & southern Ohio, because we're looking in the wrong places.  I've always been told to look in eastern or southeastern Ohio because of the wooded hills, but have yet to find a satisfactory viewpoint there.  What we really need to be looking for are raptor 'funnels' - sites that have a tendency to offer hawks a natural pathway of north-south bluffs or hills that ease their migration.  By this criterion, river valleys may have more to offer than wooded hills, especially all of our large rivers flowing south.  I imagine that some of you all on this listserve have tried to look for migrants along some of these river valleys, especially the lower Scioto, the Little Miami, and the Greater Miami.  Each of them has a long line of bluffs, along with some natural 'lookouts', that would seem to offer a better raptor funnel than Darby Creek.  What have you found?

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