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14And as Audubon mentored Baird, so did Bairdmentor dozens of the best ornithologists ofthe late 19th and early 20th centuries, manyof whom got their start as frontier collectors.(Baird’s father-in-law was Inspector-Generalof the U.S. Army, and through him, Bairdcould post military officers with a knack forscience to almost any Western fort that hewished).Not all were Army surgeons and cavalryofficers, though. Among Baird’s manycorrespondents was a young schoolteacherfrom Berks County named Levi Mengel, whoeven before he graduated high school in the1880s had assembled a collection that wouldeventually grow to thousands of eggs andbird skins, and form the basis of the ReadingPublic Museum, which he founded in 1907.Mengel, in turn, struck up a friendship witha young artist and museum collector at theAcademy of Natural Sciences named EarlPoole, who eventually succeeded Mengel asthe director of the Reading Museum, and whowent on to an illustrious career as a scientist,illustrator and educator.The Schuylkill and the Delaware bothflow through the same, 220-mile-longridge, variously known as the Blue or FirstMountain but more formally called theKittatinny Ridge. The water gaps they formare among the prettiest on Earth (thoughrecent commercial sprawl in the neighboringDead hawks from one day of shooting. Courtesy Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Archivesvalley has marred the Schuylkill gap). But alongthis long, narrow ridgeline comes a great floodtide ofraptors each fall, one of the greatest bird migrations inNorth America, and one whose history was pivotal forconservation.In the late 1920s, state ornithologist George MikschSutton wrote a short note in an ornithological journalabout the unusual concentration of northern goshawksturned in for bounty at one spot along the Kittatinnyon the Schuylkill/Berks county line, and a youngconservationist named Dick Pough – who would go onto found the Nature Conservancy two decades later–came to investigate.