We’re at the rock-strewn North Lookout at the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, about eighty miles northwest of Philadelphia in the folded Appalachians. The second two weeks of September are the prime periods for spotting migrating raptors headed for winter quarters; sometimes, thousands of eagles, hawks, and vultures pass over this spot on a good day. “A good day” for raptors is a lot like a good day for a New England sap run: cool night followed by a warm, sunny day. As the cold morning air in the valleys warms in the sun, it rises in masses or columns called thermals, which the raptors need in order to cover the distance to their winter habitat.

The hawks we’re seeing today were most likely in New England or Ontario only a couple of days ago. They try to follow broken ground, where a breeze flowing over the hilltops lumps up much like water in a rapid river. Increasingly, big-box paved parking lots also provide muscular thermals; witness the anomaly of eagles and turkey vultures soaring over the asphalt at the shopping centers of West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Rising as high as possible in each updraft, the hawks leave it to glide south, slowly descending till they find another, and using as little energy as possible. The director of the sanctuary explains that they need to eat as much as 15% of their body weight each day, which in an average-sized raptor translates to two chipmunks.

We often hear it said that Nature provides. It’s probably more accurate to say that Nature coincides. The climate in southeastern Pennsylvania is ideal for the five species of oaks that grow here (and chestnut, before it was wiped out by blight). Oaks produce acorns by uncountable billions; acorns attract and feed squirrels and chipmunks; and the little critters in their turn feed the passing hawks, when they pause for the night and hunt from their perches in the oaks. On top of that, Kittatinny Ridge, of which Hawk Mountain is a part, is the southeasternmost ridge of the folded terrain of eastern Pennsylvania. Birds picking it up at the northern end can cruise its air currents for 300 miles. They arrive here, often, in “kettles” of dozens, hundreds, even thousands. Finally, I guess you’d have to say that the hawks feed the local economy when the raptor-watchers show up by the thousand just before leaf-peeping season and fill every hostelry within miles. It all works together beautifully.

Not long ago it wasn’t so beautiful. Our agrarian past has bequeathed many of us hostile attitudes toward predators other than ourselves. Fish and Wildlife departments once paid bounties for shooting “bad hawks,” those presumed to prey on farm animals and small game. Shotgunners used to converge on Hawk Mountain and often slew hundreds of raptors in a day. The visitors’ center here displays old black-and-white photographs of the kill laid out in rows on the ground. Then in 1934 a lady from away, Rosalie Edge of New York City, leased (and soon bought) the property, posted it to hunting, and hired wardens and a caretaker to enforce the prohibition. Her posted signs had to be replaced quite often. But with the end of bounties on hawks, their subsequent protection, and the influx of thousands of bird-watchers, the poaching finally ended.

“Osprey above Number Three!” somebody says (the prominences on the opposite ridge are numbered); all the binoculars swing to that spot as a familiar crooked-wing shape slides southwest on the wind. The official counter makes a note on his pad. A pair of broad-winged hawks soars easily past from right to left. Then somebody hollers, “Here comes a kestrel!” A falcon about the size of a blue jay, wings fluttering furiously – the Jack Russell terrier of raptors – dives on the broad-wings, who bob and weave and do all they can to get away as fast as possible. The kestrel, triumphant, zooms back to look for more harassees, and makes a couple of passes at the stuffed great-horned owl mounted on a pole in the middle of the crowd of watchers. The owl doesn’t duck or fluff up the way it would if it were alive; the kestrel retires indignantly. “They’re just born with an attitude,” someone observes.

The part of Pennsylvania is German country: Eckville, Dreherville, Kutztown. As soon as I pulled off the interstate, I was on the set of the movie Gettysburg – limestone houses and barn foundations, overhanging barns, village houses set right against the road. Though crisscrossed by busy interstates packed full of semi- and double-trailer rigs roaring past truck stops lit at night by tall-stemmed vapor floodlights, and its roads flooded by high-speed traffic seemingly oblivious to current fuel prices, it still retains in its side valleys the flavor of old, rural Pennsylvania. I took back roads and the long way around whenever I could, and steeped myself in the alkaline pleasure of water flowing over limestone, so unlike the acid, granite streams of home.

We dined one evening at the Kempton Hotel, a funky wooden structure that originally housed migrant railroad construction crews over a century ago. I felt constrained to try the local specialties – Yuengling beer (oldest brewery in America) and pig’s stomach. The beer was great.