{"id":19083,"date":"2013-10-08T04:00:09","date_gmt":"2013-10-08T10:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=19083"},"modified":"2013-10-07T19:16:14","modified_gmt":"2013-10-08T01:16:14","slug":"male-northern-harrier-hunting-low-and-slow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/08\/male-northern-harrier-hunting-low-and-slow\/","title":{"rendered":"Male Northern Harrier – Hunting Low And Slow"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been photographing Northern Harriers for almost 7 years now and I still get a thrill whenever I can get close to one of these\u00a0shy hawks.\u00a0 And if it’s an elusive\u00a0adult male (the\u00a0“Gray Ghost”), well that’s just icing on the cake.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/a><\/p>\n

1\/1250, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This one was using the “low and slow” hunting technique that I described in an earlier post.\u00a0 Notice the hanging feet that are often indicative of this type of hunting.\u00a0 In my experience they don’t do this very often when they’re this close to humans because their air speed is so slow that (I suspect) it makes them feel\u00a0quite vulnerable – any evasive maneuver to avoid potential danger from someone like me would be more difficult to pull off at that very\u00a0slow speed.<\/p>\n

Most\u00a0of the time this bird was looking down as it hunted but occasionally he would glance in my direction just to check me out – which allowed me to get momentary eye contact.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"northern<\/a><\/p>\n

1\/1250, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I was able to get two almost identical images of him – one wing beat and two shutter clicks apart.\u00a0 The primary difference between the two shots is the angle of the head.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting to note that males tend to hunt in more open habitat than females do – the\u00a0 significantly larger\u00a0females prefer denser and taller vegetation.\u00a0 This is partly because males take more birds as prey than females do but also because females exclude males from their preferred hunting habitats during winter.<\/p>\n

I’ve noticed the results of those preferences in my images.\u00a0 Most of my\u00a0photos of hunting harriers show the males in open areas as you see here while the shots of females tend to\u00a0show them hunting tall\u00a0and dense stands of phragmites.<\/p>\n

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

I’ve been photographing Northern Harriers for years now and I still get a thrill whenever I can get close to one of these shy hawks. And if it’s an elusive adult male (the “Gray Ghost”), well that’s just icing on the cake.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19112,"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":[334,341],"tags":[86,146,746,1315,211,234],"class_list":["post-19083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-northern-harriers","tag-circus-cyaneus","tag-flight","tag-gray-ghost","tag-hunting-technique","tag-male","tag-northern-harrier"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/northern-harrier-1733b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4XN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19083","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=19083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}