Merrimack Valley & Lowlands · Franklin
Franklin Falls Dam
The Merrimack Valley's Common Nighthawk funnel — a few hundred an evening in late August.
Franklin Falls is where the Pemigewasset comes out of the mountains and the valley opens up, and the river acts as a flyway. The best-known event here is the Common Nighthawk migration in the last week of August into the first days of September: stand at a river overlook in the hour before dark and watch loose flocks working south down the valley after insects, wings crooked, white wing-bars flashing. On a good evening it’s a few hundred birds; the state’s biggest single-evening counts have come from this stretch of the Merrimack drainage.
The rest of the year the flood-control lands are quietly good — a big block of undeveloped floodplain with breeding warblers, vireos, and flycatchers, migrant sparrows in the shrubby openings, and waterbirds on the impoundment when it’s holding water.