State College Bird Club (Brief) Meeting
September 24, 2025


Presiding: Doug Wentzel

Recording: Peggy Wagoner Saporito
 
Attendance: 31 in person/20 on zoom

Meeting Format: Hybrid: In-person and Zoom


Announcements/Other Activities:

For our first meeting of 2025-26, Doug began by thanking Millbrook Marsh Nature Center for allowing SCBC to use this lovely classroom space for monthly meetings again this year.  He welcomed new bird club meeting participants who introduced themselves. Then each Board member introduced themselves to the audience.

Thanks to the efforts of Alissa Pendorf, Joe Gyekis, Karen Kottlowski and Doug Wentzel, SCBC secured a gift of $20,000 from an anonymous charitable trust to be used toward bird conservation and education. Jon Kauffman will chair a committee to discuss dispersal of this money. Any dues-paying members or board members who are interested in participating in the committee, please email Jon.

For those who bird at Black Moshannon State Park and need a bite to eat while there, the nearby Midstate Airport Café is now open from 10:00-2:00 except in icy weather.

Recent field trips, such as Swifts and Sweets in July and Spring Creek Heronry in September, have been well attended thanks to the community outreach activities including tabling events, our website and Facebook page.  A big thank you to our outreach committee, Kathy Bechdel, Jon Kauffman, Coty Ehrenhaus and Brady Thomas who have accomplished all of this. Interesting bird news and other announcements continue to be shared on our listserv as well.

Treasurer’s report:(Karen Kottlowski):

SCBC account balances: checking: $22350.95 (thanks to the anonymous donation) and savings: $5580.18. Paypal which is currently unavailable for member dues or other transactions has $550.


Bird Club Field Trips and Tabling Activities: (Kathy Bechdel - VP of Field Trips)

There are three more field trips this fall: Centre Hall area this Saturday, Curwensville Lake on October 5 and Bald Eagle State Park on November 16. Details can be found on our website www.scbirdcl.org.

Kathy thanked the volunteers who have helped at tabling events. Sue Braun, one of those volunteers, shared that it was a fun and easy activity because the materials at the table are well organized and interactive. This has been a good mechanism to increase awareness about SCBC among the broader community. Kathy had signup sheets at the back of the room during the meeting for anyone willing to participate for 1-2 hours in either of the two future tabling events, one on October 8 at Tussey Mountain and one on October 18 at the Friends School. Contact Kathy Bechdel if you are interested but missed the sign up.


2024 SCBC Grant Recipients Reports

In 2024, SCBC received the first distribution of funds totaling $1331 from our Endowment for Bird Conservation managed by Centre Foundation. We used these funds along with some additional funding from the SCBC savings account to support 4 bird conservation projects:

•    Millbrook Marsh Nature Center (MMNC) – binoculars for visitor use

•    MMNC – nest boxes on Nature center property

•    Robyn Graboski, Centre Wildlife Care – Educational programs

•    Joanna Taylor, Bluebird Society of PA - nest boxes in Patton Township parks

Now that the 2024 projects have been or are nearing completion, we had an update on three of the four projects with an update on the fourth project to follow at a future SCBC monthly meeting.

Millbrook Marsh: Binocular and Nest Box projects presented by Susan Hart, Nature Center supervisor.

Using funds provided by SCBC six pairs of Bushnell waterproof binoculars were purchased for use on-site by visitors to the education building. The binoculars have been especially useful to loan to bird walk participants who do not have binoculars.

The existing nest boxes at MMNC have been maintained over the years by Nick Bolgiano. Later this week, Nick will help Susan by making suggestions about optimal placement of new SCBC-funded nest boxes for a variety of cavity nesting species and Jon K will suggest placement of a screech owl box on MMNC property.

Centre Wildlife Care Educational Programs presented by Robyn Graboski, Director/Founder CWC

The primary mission of CWC is wildlife rescue, rehabilitation and release back to the wild. Robyn, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, and the volunteers that assist her encounter around 2000 animals per year. Their secondary mission is educational outreach using some of the non-releasable animals as ambassadors in educational programs. The SCBC funding allowed CWC to participate in four educational outreach activities in the local community:

•    Boy Scout event at Penns Cave with 200-300 scouts. CWC brought their non-releasable Broad-winged hawk as the animal ambassador.

•    New Story Schools for 50 children with special education needs

•    Easter Egg Hunt at Port Matilda Legion (out of an abundance of caution, due to the presence of avian flu in the region at the time, cold-blooded animal ambassadors, amphibians and reptiles, were used instead of birds)

•    Port Matilda Centennial Celebration with several hundred participants. CWC brought a barn owl as their animal ambassador.


Speaker: Rebecca McCabe: “Broad-winged Hawk Project at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.”

This entire presentation can be viewed for a limited time at:
https://psu.zoom.us/rec/share/iRP3oDS9texul7lLgNmC9nqAwfLqEqIHuVpi6LLtd9jGEwOO4tV4ACvYezX7zJNp.z0Z4LELywWiNvr9V

Since 2014, Rebecca has been studying broad-winged hawks, among other raptors including snowy owls and American kestrels through her post graduate studies and her work as a research biologist at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary (HMS).

Rebecca first provided some information about the 91-year history and activities of HMS as well as some general information about broad-winged hawk (BWH) population dynamics observed over the years. Typically, HMS sees 8000-13000 BWH, the most numerous migrant during fall migration. BWH are long distant migrants breeding in the eastern half of the US and Canada and wintering in locations from southern Mexico to Brazil with a small population wintering in Florida. They are complete migrants, meaning the entire population migrates.

Recently a decline in numbers for the 10-year averages at many hawk watch sites here in the East have been detected. Using Breeding Bird Survey data, HMS has also documented a 16% decline in nesting activity since the 1980’s.

To understand all aspects of BWH populations and life history, HMS established the Broad-Winged Hawk Project in 2014 to study breeding, fall migration, wintering and spring migration.

Rebecca described some of the techniques to study these hawks including color banding to enhance researchers’ ability to identify individuals over multiple years and tagging with geolocators to follow movements of individual birds.

She described many of the interesting findings from this research and discussed the stories and movements of some of the individual birds that have been carefully followed for multiple years.

Findings include information about the high degree of site fidelity, both for the breeding area and on wintering grounds, with individuals returning to the same forested locations each year. They have also studied the interesting and little understood movements of these birds, primarily females, post breeding and pre-migration. Rebecca discussed impacts of deforestation due to agriculture, mining and fires in wintering grounds and how this affects the movements of the individuals they can track.

Rebecca also discussed the collaborators and support of many other organizations that have contributed to the Broad-winged Hawk Project.

To follow the ongoing research of the Broad-winged Hawk Project including the individual birds that have been geotagged, go to: https://www.hawkmountain.org/conservation-science/active-research/raptor-conservation-studies/broad-winged-hawks

In the future, the hope is to expand this research to additional areas to the west, tag more individuals and to continue to follow and understand individual birds that have already been tagged as a means of understanding the BWH population while it is still relatively robust to ensure this species’ lasting conservation.