Militia Hill is not tall. It sits at 330 feet, no ridge, no lake, nothing in the terrain that would pull a migrating raptor toward it the way a mountain gap or a shoreline does. If you were designing a hawk migration site from scratch, you would not pick this hill in Fort Washington State Park. Yet for going on four decades, volunteers have climbed it every fall and recorded all sixteen species of raptor that migrate along the East Coast. Not because the land is doing anything. Because people keep showing up.
That is the part most residents drive past without knowing. The wooden platform off Militia Hill Road looks like any other overlook. What it actually represents is one of the longest-running citizen science projects in the county, and the record it has built is strange enough to be worth understanding before this year's season opens on September 1.
A Single Day Can Outweigh a Whole Season
The Militia Hill Hawk Watch does not produce a steady, predictable number every year. It produces swings that would alarm anyone expecting a nature postcard.
| Data point | Count |
|---|---|
| Best single day, September 15, 2013 | 18,055 broad-winged hawks |
| 27-season average (1988 through the mid-2010s) | 11,446 raptors |
| 27-season total | 309,044 raptors |
| 2023 season | More than 40,000 raptors, the most ever recorded |
| 2024 season | The lowest count in the watch's history |
Read that last two rows again. A record-breaking season was followed almost immediately by a collapse to the lowest number the site had ever logged. That is not what a scenic overlook does. Scenic overlooks look the same every year. What Militia Hill is measuring moves, and moving numbers are the sign that something real is being tracked rather than something merely being observed.
Rich Conroy, who coordinates the count and also runs the Wild Birds Unlimited store in Dresher Town Plaza with his wife Marlene, put the whiplash plainly after the 2024 season closed. "We have literally gone from first to worst," he said. At the time, he had already spent a quarter century on that platform. He was not exaggerating.
Why the Hill Works Anyway
The honest answer is that Militia Hill has no geographic feature working in its favor. No large body of water forces raptors into a narrow corridor. No dramatic elevation change funnels them past a single point the way it does at classic hawk-watch sites elsewhere in Pennsylvania. What the hill has instead is a volunteer named Marylea Klauder, who started the count in 1988. Speaking at the watch's 30th-anniversary celebration, Conroy described it as an "amazing annual gathering that started with a card table and a few chairs in 1988." Klauder kept at it until she died at 86. The count did not stop with her. It grew into two observation decks, a butterfly garden, and a running archive of daily reports that now feeds directly into the Hawk Migration Association of North America's national database at hawkcount.org.
That is the actual mechanism here, and it is worth sitting with. The data exists because more than 200 volunteers have shown up on a schedule, in nine-to-one and one-to-five shifts, every September and October, for 38 years. The hill did not earn its record. The people standing on it did.
What Actually Happens There This Fall
The watch runs every year from September 1 through October 31, staffed daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is free. It requires no reservation, no membership, no advance sign-up of any kind. You park across from the platform on Militia Hill Road, off the Skippack Pike entrance to the park, and you walk up.
A few things worth knowing before you go:
- Broad-winged hawks are the most commonly sighted species, especially in mid-September, when large kettles can pass over in a single afternoon.
- A compiler is on the hill every day of the season and will answer questions, point out what's overhead, and explain what's being logged.
- Bring binoculars if you have them, but they are not required to enjoy an hour up there.
- Dogs are welcome throughout the park's outdoor areas, including the hill itself, as long as they stay leashed.
The Rest of the Park Is Built Around This Same Idea
Fort Washington State Park is not one continuous space. It is two separate day-use areas connected by county park land: Flourtown, which sits along the Wissahickon Creek and stays quiet even on busy weekends, and Militia Hill, which sits higher and holds both the hawk-watch platform and the trailhead for something longer.
That something longer is the Green Ribbon Trail, a 12.6-mile route that starts up in Upper Gwynedd Township and runs south through Penllyn and Ambler before entering the state park. For most of its length the trail is unpaved, natural surface, foot traffic only, maintained by Wissahickon Trails. Once it crosses into Fort Washington State Park near Militia Hill, the last stretch becomes a paved, multi-use path wide enough for bikes as well as walkers, and it continues on to link up with Forbidden Drive in Chestnut Hill's Fairmount Park.
Practically, that means a resident who wants more than a quick stop at the platform can walk in from the Ambler side and arrive at Militia Hill on foot, turning a five-minute drive-up visit into an actual afternoon. It also means the hawk watch is not an isolated attraction. It is one stop on a trail system that already runs through several of the townships around it, which is part of why the volunteer tradition has held for so long. People were already walking through here. Somebody just started counting what flew overhead.
Why This Matters More Than It Looks Like It Should
It would be easy to file the hawk watch under pleasant local trivia and move on. But the swing between the 2023 record season and the 2024 collapse is not trivia. Raptor migration counts are one of the more sensitive indicators researchers have for tracking how bird populations respond to weather patterns, prey availability, and habitat change along the whole Eastern flyway, and Militia Hill has been feeding that national picture since 1988. A hill with no natural advantage has quietly become one of the more consistent long-term data points in the region, purely on the strength of people who kept a folding chair up there for four decades.
That is the kind of detail that tells you something about a place beyond its zip code. Fort Washington is not just adjacent to a nice park. It is home to one of the longer-running pieces of amateur science in the county, run entirely by neighbors who decided the effort was worth making and then kept making it.
If you have lived here for years and never walked up Militia Hill in October, this is the season to go. Bring the dog, bring the kids, or just bring twenty minutes and watch for a kettle of broad-wings riding the afternoon thermals south. The count starts September 1.
For those weighing a move into Fort Washington or already settled in and curious what else the area has to offer, Diane Reddington has spent decades getting to know these neighborhoods block by block. Let's Connect.
