Chimney Rock

 On this trip, I long fantasized about seeing a Northern Goshawk. I had read out them in detail in H is for Hawk, despite never finishing the book because it became too morbid for me to read during Covid. While in the deep forests of Michigan and Maine, I kept my binoculars around my neck at all times as I scanned for one of these elusive hunters.

I never saw one. 

That’s not so surprising, but what did surprise me was that in New Jersey, one can see Northern Goshawks in substantial numbers when they migrate south.

This led me to look for a hawk watch spot, something I had never participated in before. There were a few in New Jersey that seemed to reliably produce Goshawks, but all were more than 40 minutes away. Not a small feat to accomplish with two kids, especially when the end game is playing by themselves while daddy stares at the sky.

So instead of going to one of these more inland sights, I settled for Chimney Rock.

It was only seven minutes from our generous hosts, so seemed worth an afternoon.

The entire family went out the first time, parked, and hiked maybe a quarter of a mile to a cliff with a commanding view that overlooked… the largest rock quarry I had ever seen. Seriously, this thing had a fleet of the BIG dump trucks, like the ones you don’t ever see on roads.

But the hawks don’t seem to mind. I immediately spotted a large kettle of turkey vultures (perhaps 20?) rising high on a thermal of air likely made from the massive amount of stone heating in the sun.

“You ever drive on a road in New England?” A man asked his friend in a Jersey accent. (Interesting to compare to New York and Maine, all new for me). 

“Yeah, sure,” The other guy said, quaking. He was not approaching the three-foot handrail and seemed rather concerned that my two kids were pressed up against it to (Leo was, anyway) to look at dump trucks and (in Xander’s case) try to grab some sort of thorny/poisonous plant. Just kidding. I checked it and warned him firmly not to eat it, so was pretty sure I could keep checking those vultures for a goshawk.

“Then you drove on stone that came from right here,” The other guy crossed his arms smugly and looked out at the half-consumed mountain, as if he himself had been responsible for its destruction. I suppose that in some small way we both were.

“Interesting, yeah,” the other guy muttered before saying something about how terrified of heights he was.

I kept one eye on the sky, the other on my kids until another family came up, and Raquel started talking with them.

“You know uh… all the rock on New Jersey for the roads? It all comes from right here,” The other fella said, in an equally delightful Jersey accent.

I smiled and continued to watch the show through my binoculars.

I returned a few days later, this time with Kumiko instead of my darling wife.

Instead of men from Jersey explaining the importance of this place to the local infrastructure, I found a birder listening to the Beatles with his eyes trained on the sky.

This was unusual for me. Normally, when I (or almost anyone) bird watches, they do so in silence. All the better to listen to the calls, right? But a hawk watch is focused on the hawks hundreds of feet up. They don’t care about a construction site, much less a boombox, so we were free to Let it Be.

I asked if they had happened to see Goshawk (haha, whose twitching, not me!).

“Yeah, we saw one, about four years ago,” the bird nerd replied wistfully. “That’d be the holy grail,” he elaborated, much to my displeasure.

So no Goshawk was seen. The best we managed was red-shouldered, which for me was less than spectacular. I used to teach at a school that had breeding pair that lived above a pond just past the fence line, so I’ve seen them up close and personal. A flyover was nothing spectacular.

But we did see another kettle of vultures, this one maybe 40 individuals, and Kumiko thought it was the coolest thing she had ever seen.

“We are very lucky!” she exclaimed, when we saw them first start to hit the thermal and rise in a tight vortex of teetering black wings.

We weren’t really, I’ve seen the same sight dozens of times, but it was so awesome to see something like that through someone’s eyes for the first time.

Leo thought it was pretty cool too.

“You gotta write about Chimney Rock, Daddy, you gotta,” he told me later, when we had returned to the house and were regaling Raquel with tales of the kettle of vultures we had seen.  

So there you are, Chimney Rock.