Attention fishermen: there's another outdoor activity you may love. You may be a natural-born hawk-watcher and not even know it.

Fishing and hawk-watching during migration have much in common.

For one thing, when you fish, you don't just settle for the nearest puddle. You choose a spot that's been productive in the past, you wet a line and you wait patiently.

Ditto hawk-watching.

Observers of the south-bound push of broadwinged hawks, bald eagles and other raptors -- now at its height in our part of Virginia -- congregate on ridgetops and other places where large kettles have been seen in previous years. You don't blunder through the woods and scare up stuff. You sit and wait for good things to happen.

The best-known site near Roanoke is the Harvey's Knob overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway near milepost 94.5, where fanatical regulars -- and in this case the word "fanatical" is not hyperbole -- set up with chairs, spotting scopes, binoculars (and sometimes even huge cauldrons of sausage gravy).

In recent years I've been spotting from a site near Pine Spur Overlook on the Parkway. There's also Clyde Kessler's venerable pasture site near the Saddle overlook on the Parkway at mile 168.

Second, with both fishing and hawk-watching, there's the thrill of anticipation. At any moment you might pull in a huge lunker of a bass -- or maybe just a few crappie.

Or you might get skunked and go home empty-handed.

Similarly, hawk-watchers know that the next five minutes might be dead -- or a huge kettle of broadwings might emerge from behind the far ridge.

You never know, and that's the thrill of it.

Third -- and this is where real fishermen and hawk-watchers share DNA -- you don't need to come home with a full creel to have fun. Veteran anglers enjoy even the slow days.

I've heard the same phrase from many local raptorphiles, veterans such as Clyde Kessler, Bill James and Dave Holt: "Any day on the mountain is a good day."

I know what they mean. Late summer and early autumn is the crown of the year for many birders.

Days are comfortably warm, but without the punishing heat and humidity of high summer.

The pellucid light of late September lacks the greasy white quality of mid-summer, intensifying the greens and oncoming reds and yellows of autumn. So many years I've sat in the pasture at Rocky Knob, the colored counties spread out before me in the misty distance, and known perfect contentment.

Whether or not the skies are filled with raptors, there's always stuff to see: warblers flitting in the woods along the pasture margin, crows loudly commenting on our presence, and migrating monarchs, floating in the blue above like chips of orange stained glass.

So fishermen, give it a shot. Now is the best time of the year to spot exciting kettles of broadwings.

The regulars at Harvey's Knob always welcome newbies.

If you'd like to be hooked up with watchers at other sites, drop me a line at the e-mail address below my photo [above].

And good luck.