In 1934, a New York socialite bought the Pennsylvania mountain where hunters shot hundreds of hawks; the killing stopped almost overnight

Every autumn, thousands of hawks, eagles, and falcons ride the wind currents above a ridge in eastern Pennsylvania. Birdwatchers still gather there today, continuing a count that began in 1934. According to a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Ecology, this ridge holds the oldest and most complete continuous record of raptor migration anywhere in the world. That record exists because a wealthy New York socialite refused to look away from a photograph of dead hawks.

Her name was Rosalie Edge, and her story reads like something out of a movie.

A hat trend that nearly wiped out America's birds
To understand why Edge mattered, rewind to 1886. On a single walk through uptown Manhattan, ornithologist Frank Chapman counted feathers, wings, or entire stuffed birds on more than three-quarters of the roughly 700 women's hats he passed, representing 40 different bird species, according to a Stanford University ornithology archive's account of the census. Feathers were fashion's biggest trend at the time, and millions of birds were being killed every year to keep up with demand.


Public pressure eventually forced change. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service notes that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 effectively ended the commercial trade in wild bird feathers by making it illegal to kill most native species without a permit. Songbirds and wading birds slowly recovered. Hawks, eagles, and other birds of prey got no such protection, since many Americans at the time still viewed them as pests that killed chickens and game birds.

From suffragist to birder
Rosalie Edge wasn't born a birder. She was born in 1877 into a wealthy Manhattan family and spent years working for women's right to vote, a fight New York won in 1917. It wasn't until her mid-forties, following a painful separation from her husband, that she found comfort watching birds in Central Park. She quickly became a fixture among the city's birders, known for her sharp questions.

In the summer of 1929, a friend mailed her a pamphlet accusing the country's leading bird-protection group, the National Association of Audubon Societies, of quietly siding with hunters instead of birds. Edge was outraged. That October, she walked into the association's annual meeting in New York City and publicly grilled its leadership. She kept up the pressure for years, and in 1940 the organization renamed itself the National Audubon Society, according to Audubon's own official history, gradually shifting away from its earlier support for predator-control programs and moving toward protecting birds of prey as well.

The mountain where hawks were shot for sport
Edge's next fight hit closer to home. In 1933, she saw a photograph of more than 200 dead hawks laid out on a Pennsylvania hillside, shot by weekend hunters who believed birds of prey threatened chickens and game birds. When she learned the land was for sale, she decided to buy it herself.

In the summer of 1934, Edge signed a lease on the property, using $500 borrowed from Willard Van Name, a zoologist and close conservation ally, with an option to purchase it later for about $3,500, according to a memoir written by Edge's son, Peter, and published by Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. She leased roughly 1,400 acres and immediately installed a warden, a young naturalist named Maurice Broun, to keep hunters off the land. The same account notes that the shooting stopped almost immediately once the warden arrived. The property became Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, widely considered the world's first refuge created specifically for birds of prey.

A count that helped uncover the DDT crisis
Broun did more than guard the mountain. At Edge's suggestion, he began counting every hawk that passed overhead each fall, a tradition still running today. Between 1935 and 1939, about 40 percent of the bald eagles he counted were young birds. By 1957, that number had collapsed to just one young eagle for every 32 adults he recorded.

Those figures caught the attention of biologist and writer Rachel Carson, who used Broun's counts as evidence in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, which exposed how the pesticide DDT was harming birds of prey across the country. The Ecology journal study notes that the sanctuary's long-term database later proved key to identifying pesticide contamination in top predators such as bald eagles, ospreys and peregrine falcons, work that helped guide their eventual recovery.

Why her story still matters
That same instinct for counting things and questioning power lives on at Hawk Mountain today. According to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary's conservation science program, researchers still track raptor migration there every season, work that has expanded into climate studies on species such as golden eagles and kestrels, showing how warming winters are shifting migration routes farther north.

The sanctuary says its conservation science team works with more than 25 species and supports a global training network that has hosted 440+ trainees from 75 countries. Its active projects range from American kestrels and broad-winged hawks to northern goshawks, hooded vultures and peregrine falcons, and the site also tracks migrants with public maps and annual count data.

Rosalie Edge never held elected office or ran a major institution. She simply refused to accept easy answers from people in power, and she was willing to spend her own money to prove her point. Her mountain still stands watch over the birds she refused to stop defending, and every fall, someone is still up there counting.