Climb Hawk Hill on a clear afternoon this week and you'll find the same thing you've always found: wind that arrives from nowhere, a view that stretches from Alcatraz to Mount Tamalpais, and a knot of people with binoculars angled north, waiting. What you might not notice, unless you were paying attention two years ago, is that the knot of people almost wasn't there at all.

Today is September 21. On this exact date in 1984, volunteers on this hill logged as many as 2,800 hawk sightings in a single day, the highest one-day count in the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory's history, driven mostly by a wall of Sharp-shinned and Cooper's hawks riding the updrafts toward the bridge. That record has stood for 42 years. The birds that set it never stopped coming back. The organization that counts them almost did.

A Migration on Geography's Clock, Not the Observatory's

The reason Hawk Hill exists as a birding destination has nothing to do with staffing or funding. It's topography. Marin's peninsula narrows here into a two-mile gap before the Golden Gate, and most raptors avoid flying over open water because they can't find the thermals and updrafts that make long-distance soaring efficient. So every fall, as hawks, falcons, eagles and vultures work their way south along the coast, they get squeezed into this bottleneck and funnel directly over the hill.

That funnel runs on a schedule set by wind and daylight, not by whoever happens to be staffing the counting platform that year. The heaviest flight days typically fall between September 15 and October 8, with the single busiest day usually landing somewhere in the September 25 to 30 window, a spike almost always driven by Sharp-shinned and Cooper's hawks moving through together. The broader migration, when hourly counts regularly climb past 120 raptors and can spike to ten times that on a good day, tends to run through early November. Best viewing is on fog-free days between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., roughly September through November, according to the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, which manages the site.

None of that changed in 2024 or 2025. The birds showed up on time both years. What changed was whether anyone official was there to count them.

The Five Weeks the Count Went Dark

In September 2024, the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory abruptly paused all of its volunteer programming, right in the middle of peak migration season. A spokesperson for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy told KQED the decision was effective September 6, citing an intent to maintain "a safe, respectful, and inclusive workplace," without further explanation. Volunteers who had been climbing the hill nearly every day since August found their emails to staff bouncing back. Social media accounts went quiet. For an organization that had tracked this migration without interruption since 1984, the count simply stopped.

Glenn Phillips, executive director of the Golden Gate Bird Alliance, which trains and supplies volunteers to the observatory, told KQED at the time that the stakes went beyond a single missed season.

"The most critical thing that we're worried about is that we're losing that data point in a long-term dataset that has been uninterrupted for many, many years... In this day and age, with climate change and wildfires, there's so much change happening in our environment that missing a year could actually cloud our understanding of what's really happening in the world."

The Hawkwatch counting program relaunched between October 7 and 14, 2024, about five weeks after it stopped. The banding program, which involves trapping, tagging and releasing raptors for closer study, did not resume for the rest of that season.

What the Volunteers Actually Logged in 2025

The following fall, the count came back, but not to its old rhythm. According to the Parks Conservancy's own 2025 season summary, Hawkwatch volunteers logged 184.18 hours on the hill from August 11 through September 30, then went dark again until November 17, picking back up through November 30. In practice, that means October, historically one of the two strongest stretches of the entire migration, had no official Hawkwatch coverage in 2025.

Here's how the last three seasons actually compare on paper:

Despite the gap, 2025 still produced real numbers. Volunteers tallied 6,741 raptors at an average rate of 35.13 per hour, and saw 16 of the 19 possible raptor species that pass through the Headlands, missing only Prairie Falcon, American Goshawk and Swainson's Hawk on the official list. The top four most-sighted birds were Red-tailed Hawk, Turkey Vulture, Sharp-shinned Hawk and Cooper's Hawk, with Broad-winged Hawk and American Kestrel close behind. The same summary closes with a line that tells you everything about where the organization's confidence stood heading into this year: "We'll keep our fingers and talons crossed for an uninterrupted 2026 season."

The Hill Itself Looks Different Now

If you haven't been up Conzelman Road in a while, the hill you'll find has changed independent of any of this. The Hawk Hill Visitor Improvement Project wrapped in fall 2025, adding native plantings, newly paved paths and new informational signage around the summit. It's a practical upgrade as much as a cosmetic one. Hawk Hill also happens to be habitat for the Mission blue butterfly, one of the first invertebrates ever protected under the Endangered Species Act, and the restoration work tied to the visitor project has focused partly on protecting the lupine plants its caterpillars depend on.

The military history is still there underneath all of it. Battery 129, a World War II gun emplacement built into the hilltop, still anchors the summit, a reminder that this scenic overlook spent decades as a coastal defense post before the National Park Service folded it into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in the early 1970s.

What This Means If You're Heading Up This Season

None of the staffing turbulence changes when the birds actually fly. If you want to catch the migration at its most dramatic, the calendar hasn't moved: aim for a fog-free midday window sometime in the next two weeks, when the Sharp-shinned and Cooper's hawks tend to peak, and don't be surprised if a hazy morning burns off into a clear early afternoon by the time you're standing at the top.

A few things worth knowing before you go. Parking at the base lot fills fast on weekends and during peak migration weeks, so arrive before 10 a.m. if you want a spot close to the trailhead, or expect to find space along Conzelman Road instead. There's no food or water sold on the hill itself, only at the Marin Headlands Visitor Center a short drive away, so pack what you need. Leashed dogs are welcome. And Hawk Hill genuinely does have its own weather, often colder and windier than whatever's happening a few miles away in Sausalito or Mill Valley, so bring more layers than you think you'll need.

As for whether the counters are back on their usual full schedule this fall, that's still an open question even to the people running the program, who were hoping out loud as recently as their last published report. What's not in question is that the migration itself, the thing that made this hill worth climbing in the first place, showed up exactly when it always does. It doesn't check anyone's staffing calendar. It just flies.

That kind of reliability, layered against a couple of rocky years for the humans trying to track it, is a small but telling story about how Marin actually works. The landscape holds its patterns even when the institutions built around it wobble. It's part of what makes this county worth paying attention to, season after season, whether you're watching hawks from a hilltop or just calling it home.

If Marin's rhythms, from the Headlands to the harbor towns, are part of why you're here or thinking about staying, the Kathleen Leonard Team would welcome the chance to talk about what living in this county actually looks like, hawk migrations included. Reach out anytime to start that conversation.