Nighthawk Lottery (09Sep2014)

This evening I won the nighthawk lottery.  I don't know how many birders have seen a flight of a couple thousand night hawks.  I was birding the Fort Fisher museum area looking for warblers and naturally I was looking up.  I noticed a large group of nighthawks forming a kettle way up high.  You can see in this photo they are facing every which way.  There is about 108 nighthawks in the below picture and this was just a fraction of the sky there were covering.  Its hard to take a picture of the sky with a 100-300 lens.  In hindsight I should have taken a movie with my iPhone.

I walked out of the tree line to get a better view of the sky and thats when I noticed all of them flying in the same direction - South.  They were streaming by at a good clip, just below the clouds.  I tried setting up quadrants in the sky and then added the quadrants and by the time I got close to a thousand the birds that were at the beginning of my first quadrant had already been replaced by another set of birds.  I would say when all was said and done 20 minutes later, several thousand birds had gone by. I guess the nice West wind was pushing all the birds to the coast where the numbers were concentrating.

The above picture was the tail end of one of the groups shot with 300 lens.  You can see they were really high up.  With my 10 power bins I could just make out the white wing bars.

What an amazing experience.