Tag: circus cyaneus

Strange Encounter with a Northern Harrier and a Junco

For me, life just doesn’t get much better than when I’m watching interesting or unusual bird behaviors up close.  I was photographing this male Northern Harrier out my pickup window while it was perched on the clump of snow-bent vegetation you see in the image below when I heard a soft scratching sound coming from the front of my truck.  I quickly glanced to my right and noticed that a Dark-eyed Junco had landed square in the middle of the hood of the truck.  I thought that was unusual of course but I was more interested in the harrier so I quickly turned back to watching him through my viewfinder and it immediately became apparent that the harrier was now fixated on that junco.         1/3200, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc  I’ve spent hundreds of hours watching and photographing harriers and it’s virtually unheard of for one to take off in my direction when I’m this close to the bird.  Usually the direction of take off is away from me or if I’m lucky it might be either to my left or right.  But this one had apparently decided that it wanted junco for lunch and when it launched it immediately turned slightly and headed straight toward the junco on my truck hood.     1/3200, f/8, ISO 400, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc If you look carefully at the harriers eyes in all four shots you’ll notice that he isn’t really focused on me – instead he’s looking slightly to my right, directly at the junco on the hood of the…

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A License to Bird

To be perfectly honest I’ve always been slightly disdainful of personalized (vanity) license plates, at least for me.   I generally prefer relative anonymity, partly because my natural inclination is to avoid bringing attention to myself (so why am I blogging?…)  Not to say that I don’t enjoy reading them on other vehicles while driving and I often have fun with the challenge of trying to figure out what some of them really mean.   Since I spend a lot of time photographing birds I occasionally run across “birder plates” at some of the refuges and marshes I frequent.  So recently, after the purchase of a new pickup, I decided to break out of my mold and join the crowd.    For me, “HARRIER” was almost a foregone conclusion if it was still available, and it was.  Many of the better images in my avian collection are of the Northern Harrier, which most folks refer to simply as “harrier”.   Whenever I’m forced to choose a favorite avian subject (a choice I don’t like to make) I typically choose this species.  They’re magnificent aerial athletes, beautiful, extremely challenging photographic subjects and they carry that “raptor mystique”.     Canon 7D, 1/3200, f/7.1, ISO 500, EV -0.33, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc After waiting over 6 weeks to have them delivered (come on Utah, get on the stick!) they finally arrived a few days ago.  Today was my first day photographing birds since I got them and I thought it fitting that I was able to get this shot of a juvenile male harrier taking off from a sagebrush out on Antelope…

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Raptors Mobbing Raptors

Mobbing is an antipredator behavior where animals mob a predator by cooperatively attacking or harassing it.  This behavior is especially common in birds during nesting and rearing of young.  Typically, it will be a flock of  passerines like Red-winged Blackbirds mobbing a raptor or perhaps a magpie or any other bird they consider to be a threat to their nest or young.    In mid-June of this year while Mia and I were on another one of our camping/photo forays to Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge we witnessed a somewhat unusual display of mobbing – raptors mobbing raptors.  We had just returned to our camping trailer when Mia noticed this sub-adult Bald Eagle resting on a muskrat mound almost a quarter-mile away across Lower Red Rock Lake – too far away for quality photos (we had marginal light too) but we simply can’t resist training our lenses on a situation like this just to see if something interesting might happen.  And this time it did.     Canon 7D, 1/800, f/6.3, ISO 500 ev +1.33, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc The eagle seemed to be minding its own business and just hanging out for a while on the mound.      Canon 7D, 1/640, f/6.3, ISO 500 ev +1.33, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc But soon a Short-eared Owl (a male I believe) appeared on the scene and he was not happy with the presence of the eagle.  My presumption is that the owl had a nest in the area and it felt the eagle threatened the nest or young.      Canon 7D, 1/1000, f/6.3, ISO 800 ev +1.00,…

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Northern Harrier with Nesting Material

 I’ve been photographing Northern Harriers in northern Utah for five years now and until earlier this week I’d only seen this species carrying nesting material once before and wasn’t able to photograph it.   Harriers are very common here during winter but most of them head north for the breeding season and those that stay usually build their nests in inaccessible areas of the marsh, so it’s rare for me to see any nesting activities.      Canon 7D, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, 1/2000, f/7.1, ISO 400 Two days ago Mia and I were photographing birds at Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge.  We were about to call it a day because it was late in the morning and light was no longer optimal when we spotted this harrier flying at a distance.  We figured it would veer off before it got close, as they always seem to do out there, but this one kept coming toward us.  We were watching it through our lenses and soon noticed that it had nesting material in its beak.    Canon 7D, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, 1/2000, f/7.1, ISO 400 By chance we happened to be at a place on the dirt road that was within 100′ or so of the  nest of this bird.  It decided to ignore us and come in to complete its delivery.     Canon 7D, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, 1/2000, f/7.1, ISO 400 The nest is apparently in this bed of last year’s dead Phragmites.  The dark spots you see in the last three images of this…

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Fish Eating Northern Harriers

 As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, the winter of 2008 was a particularly brutal one in northern Utah.  During January and February there was much more snow than usual and it was bitterly cold.  During most winters our Northern Harriers rely primarily on voles as a food supply but in 2008 with the voles under the deep crusty snow our harriers were desperate for food.  Birds of North America Online provides extensive information on the dietary habits of harriers.  It lists small to medium-sized mammals (primarily rodents), birds, reptiles and frogs as harrier food sources, stating further that the diet of harriers during winter in their northern range (which includes northern Utah) consists of voles “almost exclusively”.  I can find no mention of harriers eating fish, ever! Each year in early February some of our wetlands managers treat some of our ponds with rotenone (a chemical that prevents oxygen from being absorbed across fish gill membranes) in an effort to control the invasive and damaging carp that do so much damage to the emergent vegetation which is so vital for waterfowl.  So, in 2008 for a few weeks, our desperate and starving harriers began to eat fish!  In the three winters since then I have never seen harriers eating fish even though the dead carp are always plentiful after the rotenone kill.    1/1250, 1/1000, ISO 500 Many of the carp are brought to the shores or ice surface by Bald Eagles which makes them available to the harriers who generally cannot retrieve them from the water.      1/1250, f/8, ISO…

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Northern Harrier Struggling to Expel a Pellet

  Except for owls, all raptors have a crop for excess food storage.  The parts of the prey that are indigestible are formed into a pellet in the gizzard and then regurgitated out of the mouth.  These pellets contain hair, feathers, exoskeletons and sometimes (in the case of owls especially) the bones of their prey.  I’ve noticed with many raptor species that expelling a pellet can be a difficult process, bordering on traumatic.  Such was the case with this juvenile male Northern Harrier. I was watching this bird through my lens but not planning on getting any quality photos because the bird was strongly side-lit.   But when he began trying to expel a pellet I couldn’t resist clicking away.  Because of the side-lighting and relatively soft focus the images are not of high quality but I thought the behavior was interesting enough for a blog post anyway.  All of the photos in this series are posted in the order that they were taken.    The beginning of the struggle to expel the pellet    Here the harrier is shaking his head from side to side to try to dislodge the pellet   But with the effort he begins to lose his balance on the perch    And almost falls  over backward    He begins to recover    And then falls forward    Begins to recover again    Still recovering    Recovered, but still with the pellet stuck in his mouth    And finally the pellet has been expelled.  As luck would have it my buffer had filled up and I missed…

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