By John Turner and Patrice Domeischel

The 2024 season of the Stone Bridge Nighthawk Watch, held on the southern bridge in Frank Melville Memorial Park in Setauket, ended on October 6.

The Watch is conducted every year by the Four Harbors Audubon Society, a chapter of the National Audubon Society, and in partnership with the Frank Melville Memorial Foundation. It  runs for 41 evenings — from August 27th through October 6th — from 5:30 p.m. to dusk. This was the eighth year of the Watch. 

The purpose is to count the number of nighthawks in an effort to provide a reliable data base which we hope will inform avian conservationists regarding trends in abundance of this fascinating, insect-eating bird.     

From the bridge compilers counted each Common Nighthawk passing by as they migrated south, ultimately destined to reach their overwintering grounds in central South America, which ranges from the Amazon River basin south to northern Argentina.

Common Nighthawks aren’t hawks, their closest Long Island relatives being two species of nightjars — Whip-poor-wills and Chuck-Will’s-Widows, both of which breed in the Long Island Pine Barrens.

The results for the 2024 season were disappointing with only 669 common nighthawks tallied, by far the worst year of the eight years of the Watch. We had only one day where we tallied a triple digit count with 103 nighthawks observed on Sept. 12. 

Totals for the other seven years are: 2046 nighthawks in 2017, 2018 nighthawks in 2018, 2757 nighthawks in 2019, 2245 nighthawks in 2020, 1819 nighthawks in 2021, 1625 nighthawks in 2022, and 1022 nighthawks in 2023.  

We don’t know the cause for this decline but weather is a suspected cause. A low pressure system sat over the North Atlantic for more than a week at the end of the Watch and some conjectured that it created unfavorable winds for migration. Hopefully we’ll have a better tally next year!

We were, though, rewarded with beautiful sunsets, by stunning cloud patterns, and many other interesting bird species including Wood Ducks (talk about eye candy!), several instances of adult Bald Eagles passing directly overhead, Blue Jays flying above us with bills and throats filled with acorns they were on the way to hoard away in hidden spots to ensure an ample winter food supply, a daily back and forth from a raucous pair of Belted Kingfishers, and the nightly antics of erratic flying bats actively feeding on aerial insects, employing their otherworldly echolocation skills to do so.