Written by Bob Jørgensen | 15 October 2009

Barnes Island is a tiny, privately owned plot of land off Harpswell's Basin Point and every autumn, during September and October, it becomes a beehive of activity as its owner, George Appel and his wife, Laura, along with daughters Amity Doolittle, Charity McNabb, and Laura Warren, are joined by naturalist Paul Donahue and his wife Theresa Woods in an annual census of migrating hawks.
George Appel, who holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology, studied in Southeast Asia and now lives in Phillips, Maine. Paul Donahue is a prominent expert on birds, who set up bird watching platforms throughout South America, where he conducted guided tours of bird sanctuaries and created maps for distribution to tourist lodges. He is also a well-known and sought after painter of birds.
The sightings of various species of hawks as they migrate along the Eastern Flyway are reported each year by Appel and his little group to an organization called Hawk Migration Association of North America (HMANA) in Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.
The project started for Appel back in 1957, when he discovered the carcasses of a number of kestrels that had been shot, despite a federal law against killing hawks. He began to take a more serious interest in the welfare of local raptors and later, in 1965, he and his family began to count the number and types of hawks that flew over his summer home on Barnes Island. Then in the seventies, they were joined by the Donahues, who live in Machias. In the past, the group used to huddle in the small shack near the Appel camp to keep warm. Due to climate change, however, they have not had to use the shack in recent years because it has been so much warmer so that they have been able to watch the migrating raptors while sitting on the rocks along the island's shoreline.
"Many changes have taken place in the past 44 years," according to Appel, "Back in the sixties, the annual bird count on ospreys was no more than a dozen birds a year. But once DDT was outlawed, however, the species flourished and now, each year we sight hundreds of these magnificent fish hawks, whose nests are often visible high atop trees, poles and light fixtures along the Midcoast." Of current concern has been a significantly steep drop in the number of sightings of Sharp Shinned Hawks. "So far," he lamented," Nobody seems to know why."
In addition to Sharp Shinned Hawks, Appel and his Maine Hawk Project also keep a lookout for other raptors including Goshawks, Coopers, Red Tailed, Red Shinned, Broad-Winged Hawks, Northern Harriers, Ospreys, Merlins, Peregrine Falcons, Kestrels and Bald Eagles. In addition to the number of each species observed, the group also notes conditions, such as time, wind speed and direction, temperature, visibility, barometric pressure and humidity on their nightly tally sheets.
For those who may be interested in watching the annual hawk migration, Appel noted that while Barnes Island does not have room for additional viewers, the Flyway crosses Harpswell Neck so that, "Anyplace on the Neck where there is an open field or waterfront affording a wide field of view of the sky is an excellent place from which to watch the daily migration. In fact, the Dolphin Marina is much better than our own observation point for hawk watching."
For further information on the HMANA look them up on the web at www.hawkcount.org.