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COPPER HARBOR -- A strong north wind made the drop in temperature seem even colder to students from Baraga, Lake Linden and four other schools who visited the Brockway Mountain on Wednesday afternoon.  They were hoping to spot some of thousands of raptors that fly through the Keweenaw during their migration north.

But the direction of the wind meant that there weren't many raptors flying.  That’s because the birds prefer southerly winds that bounce off the south facing mountain cliff and make it easier for them to soar.

"Coming up here we saw a hawk, which was cool," said Baraga sixth grader Ireland Ingram.  "But we're hoping to see some different birds and maybe come out here again when it's warmer."

"It’d be cool to see a bald eagle fly above, but I wasn't too lucky today," said Trevor Rowe, a fifth grader from Lake Linden.

Still the students did their best to identify different birds typically found in the air.  They looked at the model of an immature bald eagle, used binoculars to search the sky, and heard about a new survey started in March to monitor the numbers and kinds of raptors flying each spring.

"This is one of the major hawk migration areas in North America, and there hasn't been any systematic count done in probably 15-20 years," said the survey's hawk counter, Max Henschell.  "We’re trying to get an idea of how many birds are actually moving through the area."

As the primary spotter, Henschell spends eight hours a day, six days a week out on Brockway Mountain.  He says he expects to see close to 20,000 birds before the survey ends on June 15.