(gently flowing music) (feet crunching leaves) - My name is Gary Palmer and I'm here to count the migrating hawks here at the Tennessee Mountain Hawk Watch this spring.

- We come here as hawk watchers because it's a great location to see migration happening in the raptors of the world.

So if you look at the topography of central Pennsylvania there's these ripples or folds in the landscape and it's labeled as the Ridge and Valley region and these ripples provide a nice highway as you would say, or migration in rapter.

(gently flowing music) - It's all about the Golden Eagles here.

This is, this is a major migratory flyway for Golden Eagles.

This really is a better site than anywhere else in Eastern North America to see them headed northward on spring migration.

There's a pretty big population of them that winters throughout the mountains to the South of here down in through a lot of them will be in Tennessee and Georgia.

And then they follow these ridges to get up to Northern, Northern Canada by the Hudson Bay where they go to breed in the summer.

So this is just kind of the direct highway to get them from point A to point B.

So this is the place to be if you want to see Golden Eagles.

- What I liked the most about birdwatching is the knowing of well, what are you going to find next?

And that's the most exciting part is when you take a walk out every, every day outside on the same trail it may be different than the previous day.

So if you want to learn something new, they say take the same path you took yesterday.

So just kind of getting to know an area and how it changes through the seasons is probably the most exciting part of birdwatching.

And then it also comes down to the challenge of identification, seeing something, working through what it is or how it's behaving.

That's also a fun aspect of birdwatching.

(upbeat music) - Birdwatchers are the people I hang out with the most, for sure.

They're very welcoming people.

It's one of these hobbies that sure you could spend tens of thousands of dollars buying the fanciest equipment and on airfare in particular or you can do it without spending a dime.

You can just walk right out your back door and there's birds there.

And you can show up at a place like this.

There's all sorts of different hawk watches and different birding events.

I know that the State College Bird Club hosts lots of field trips that absolutely anybody is welcome to join.

You know, you don't need to have any sort of experience at all to come out here and enjoy the place.