{"id":164648,"date":"2024-10-07T06:13:41","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T12:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=164648"},"modified":"2024-10-07T12:20:39","modified_gmt":"2024-10-07T18:20:39","slug":"northern-harriers-and-coopers-hawks-close-encounters-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/07\/northern-harriers-and-coopers-hawks-close-encounters-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Northern Harriers And Cooper’s Hawks – Close Encounters Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Four days ago I was witness to a mostly aerial dogfight between 4-5 Northern Harriers and Cooper’s Hawks on top of Goose Egg Island at Farmington Bay WMA. In my post two days ago I provided more detailed information about the incident and posted one of my favorite shots of the extended brouhaha, but it was Saturday so that post didn’t have as many views as usual. If you missed it and you’re interested, here’s a link to that post<\/a><\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n

Today’s post is longer on photos of the encounter and shorter on descriptions.<\/p>\n

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There were 2-3 Northern Harriers and 2 (I believe) Cooper’s Hawks involved in the altercation. This harrier seemed to be the most aggressive bird in the entire bunch.<\/p>\n

Shooting conditions were difficult so this might be the best flight shot I got of an individual bird. I’ve cropped the photo as I have in order to include the horizon at bottom.<\/p>\n

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Overall, the harriers seemed to be the aggressors and the Cooper’s Hawks the ‘victims’. Here the Cooper’s Hawk at bottom had taken refuge on the edge of the hill, where refuge personnel have been adding fill dirt to the hill’s south side.<\/p>\n

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The harriers dive bombed the Coops repeatedly. Because of the steep slope of the hill and the breeze direction, the birds usually had their backs to me.<\/p>\n

I took the photo below about 1 second after the photo above.<\/p>\n

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Immediately after the harrier passed the Cooper’s Hawk, the Coop took off, apparently in pursuit of its tormentor. But in all the excitement, when I took this photo I had my camera severely tilted. Because tilted photos drive me nuts, I’ve leveled it for this version but leveling it cost me something important.<\/p>\n

Up to this point I thought there was only one Cooper’s Hawk involved in the fracas, but I now believe there were two.<\/p>\n

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Here’s the uncropped, tilted, version of the same photo. I believe the bird at lower left was Cooper’s Hawk #2. I completely ‘lost’ that bird when I leveled the image.<\/p>\n

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The harrier circled around and came back after both Cooper’s Hawks after they had moved closer together.<\/p>\n

I like this photo as documentation of the absolute pandemonium that was occurring, with one Coop taking off in a dynamic takeoff posture and the other Coop ducking just prior to take off, both in response to the aggressive harrier.<\/p>\n

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At one point, one of the Coops landed on a cement table on top of the hill and while it was there the harriers buzzed it at least a half dozen times. Sometimes they didn’t come particularly close, but other times…<\/p>\n

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the perched Coop nearly lost its head. I love that severely tilted tail.<\/p>\n

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Two frames later I’d cut off a wing but we can finally see the Coop’s face.<\/p>\n

This dogfight was already occurring when I got to the top of the hill and it lasted for quite a while, until another vehicle eventually came up the hill and scared off the participants.<\/p>\n

While it lasted it was great fun for the photographer, even though the majority of my flight shots were soft.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Four days ago I was witness to a mostly aerial dogfight between 4-5 Northern Harriers and Cooper’s Hawks on top of Goose Egg Island at Farmington Bay WMA. (9 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164649,"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":[334,380,2782,394,341],"tags":[1008,7645,2741,311,7646],"class_list":["post-164648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-coopers-hawk-diurnal-raptors","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-northern-harriers","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-fight-between-coopers-hawks-and-northern-harriers","tag-goose-egg-island","tag-utah-2","tag-what-you-lose-when-leveling-a-photo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/northern-harrier-coopers-hawk-0145-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-GPC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164648","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=164648"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":164693,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164648\/revisions\/164693"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}