{"id":130321,"date":"2023-02-18T04:47:49","date_gmt":"2023-02-18T11:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=130321"},"modified":"2023-02-18T12:02:22","modified_gmt":"2023-02-18T19:02:22","slug":"an-aerial-kerfuffle-between-a-hapless-and-vulnerable-northern-harrier-and-american-crows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2023\/02\/18\/an-aerial-kerfuffle-between-a-hapless-and-vulnerable-northern-harrier-and-american-crows\/","title":{"rendered":"An Aerial Kerfuffle Between A Hapless And Vulnerable Northern Harrier And American Crows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Serious aerial combat or more light-hearted play? In this case I strongly suspect the former.<\/p>\n

Two days ago at Farmington Bay WMA the American Crows were out in full force and seemingly determined to demonstrate that there’s a reason why a group of crows is called a “murder”. An unfortunate and greatly outnumbered Northern Harrier was the potential victim.<\/p>\n

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The gang of crows had no mercy on the harrier as they repeatedly chased and dive-bombed the hawk for at least a minute and probably closer to two. At first the combatants weren’t very close to me and the brouhaha lasted long enough for me to twice drive forward on the road in an attempt to get a little closer to them and then get them in my viewfinder again.<\/p>\n

This first shot was one of my early photos when they were farthest away and close to the ground (we can see a hint of the horizon at the bottom of the frame), so the sky background is kind of a funky color and I don’t have a lot of detail. But I think the photo allows the viewer to imagine the speed of the chase and the aerial agility of both birds involved. And how challenging the action was to photograph well.<\/p>\n

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To me the crows seemed to be at least as fast and agile as the harrier, which took me a little by surprise. They had no trouble catching up to the fleeing harrier, repeatedly, as the hawk attempted to escape. In most of my photos, and I took a bunch of them, the harrier appeared to be looking back in an attempt to keep an eye on its pursuer(s).<\/p>\n

Some of my photos that weren’t very sharp or had cut off body parts strongly suggest that there was actual physical contact, multiple times. If anyone was enjoying the encounter it certainly wasn’t the harrier.<\/p>\n

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I like this shot best because the harrier seems to know that its tail is about to get pulled. And it probably was.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Personally, I’m more than a little uncomfortable with calling a group of crows a “murder”. Kevin Dickinson, writing in Big Think<\/a><\/span><\/span>, expresses some (only some) of my misgivings reasonably well when he says:<\/p>\n

Why exactly is it a murder of crows? I know English has a fondness for giving animals fanciful group names, especially birds. A parliament of owls, a charm of finches, a lamentation of swans, the list goes on and on. But why are crows stuck with such a mean-spirited moniker, while ravens \u2014 a much larger member of the Corvidae family \u2014 live with the much less severe \u201cunkindness of ravens\u201d? For that matter, why the fancy group names in the first place?<\/em><\/p>\n

I won’t lose any sleep over it but the whole idea of what Dickinson calls “fanciful names” for groups of specific birds seems to me to be fanciful in its own right. And often inaccurate and inappropriate to boot.<\/p>\n

A “murder of crows” is at the top of my list of examples.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Serious aerial combat or more light-hearted play? In this case I strongly suspect the former. (3 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130324,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4456,5,334,2782,394,341],"tags":[4543,2120,86,4457,5585,6739,1008,140,6740,234,311,6738],"class_list":["post-130321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-crows","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-northern-harriers","tag-aerial-combat","tag-american-crow","tag-circus-cyaneus","tag-corvus-brachyrhynchos","tag-dogfight","tag-fanciful-names-for-groups-of-birds","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-fighting","tag-kerfuffle","tag-northern-harrier","tag-utah-2","tag-why-is-it-called-a-murder-of-crows"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/northern-harrier-1836-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-xTX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130321"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130394,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130321\/revisions\/130394"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}